My story is of Balham and of a family dwelling in Balham who were more Welsh than Balhamitish. Strangers to that neighbourhood who go up Harrington Road from the tram must often wonder why the second turning on the right is called Abercorran Street: the few who know Abercorran town itself, the long grey and white street, with a castle at one end, low down by the river mouth, and an old church high up at the other, must be delighted by the memories thus recalled, but they also must wonder at the name. Abercorran Street is straight, flat, symmetrically lined on both sides by four-bedroomed houses in pairs, and it runs at right angles out of Harrington Road into another road which the pair of four-bedroomed houses visible at the corner proclaim to be exactly like it. The only external variety in the street is created by the absence from two of the cast-iron gates of any notice prohibiting the entrance of hawkers and canvassers.
When I myself first saw the white lettering on a blue ground of abercorran street I was perhaps more surprised than most others have been who paid any attention to it. I was surprised but not puzzled. I knew very well why it was called Abercorran Street. For I knew Abercorran House and the Morgans, its inhabitants, and the dogs and the pigeons thereof. Who that ever knew the house and the people could ever forget them? I knew the Morgans, the father and mother, the five sons, the one daughter Jessie. I knew the house down to the kitchen, because I knew old Ann, the one permanent—I had almost written immortal—servant, of whom it was said by one knowing the facts, that they also rule who only serve and wait. I knew the breakfast room where breakfast was never finished; the dark Library where they had all the magazines which have since died of their virtues; the room without a name which was full of fishing-rods, walking-sticks, guns, traps, the cross-bow, boxes of skins, birds’ eggs, papers, old books, pictures, pebbles from a hundred beaches, and human bones. I knew the conservatory crowded with bicycles and what had been tricycles. I knew as well as any one the pigeon-houses, the one on a pole and the one which was originally a fowl-house, built with some idea or fancy regarding profit. I knew that well-worn square of blackened gravel at the foot of the back steps, where everybody had to pass to go to the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, and the wild garden beyond, and where the sun was always shining on men and children and dogs. This square was railed off from the rest of the garden. That also I knew, its four-and-twenty elms that stood about the one oak in the long grass and buttercups and docks, like a pleasant company slowly and unwillingly preparing to leave that three-acre field which was the garden of Abercorran House and called by us The Wilderness—a name now immortalised, because the christener of streets has given it to the one beyond Abercorran Street. Under the trees lay a pond containing golden water-lilies and carp. A pond needs nothing else except boys like us to make the best of it. Yet we never could fish in it again after the strange girl was drawn out of it dead one morning: nobody knew who she was or why she had climbed over into the Wilderness to drown herself; yet Ann seemed to know, and so perhaps did the tall Roland, but both of them could lock up anything they wished to keep secret and throw away the key. I knew the elms and the one oak of the Wilderness as well as the jackdaws did. For I knew them night and day, and the birds knew nothing of them between half-past five on an October evening and half-past five the next morning.
To-day the jackdaws at least, if ever they fly that way, can probably not distinguish Abercorran Street and Wilderness Street from ordinary streets. For the trees are every one of them gone, and with them the jackdaws. The lilies and carp are no longer in the pond, and there is no pond. I can understand people cutting down trees—it is a trade and brings profit—but not draining a pond in such a garden as the Wilderness and taking all its carp home to fry in the same fat as bloaters, all for the sake of building a house that might just as well have been anywhere else or nowhere at all. I think No. 23 Wilderness Street probably has the honour and misfortune to stand in the pond’s place, but they call it Lyndhurst. Ann shares my opinion, and she herself is now living in the house behind, No. 21 Abercorran Street.
Ann likes the new houses as well as the old elm-trees, and the hundreds of men, women, and children as well as the jackdaws—which is saying a good deal; for she loved both trees and birds, and I have heard her assert that the birds frequently talked in Welsh as the jackdaws used to do at the castle of Abercorran; but when I asked her why she thought so and what they said, she grew touchy and said: “Well, they did not speak English, whatever, and if it was Welsh, as I think, you cannot expect me to pervert Welsh into English, for I am no scholar.” She is keeping house now for the gentleman at 21 Abercorran Street, a Mr Henry Jones. She would probably have been satisfied with him in any case, since he is the means by which Ann remains alive, free to think her own thoughts and to bake her own bread; to drink tea for breakfast, tea for dinner, tea for tea, tea for supper, and tea in between; to eat also at long intervals a quart of cockles from Abercorran shore, and a baked apple dumpling to follow; and at night to read the Welsh Bible and a Guide to the Antiquities of Abercorran. But Ann is more than satisfied because Mr Jones is Welsh. She admits his claim in spite of her unconcealed opinion that his Dolgelly Welsh, of which she can hardly understand a word, she says, is not Welsh at all. Of his speech as of the jackdaws she can retort: “He does not speak English, whatever.”
Ann will never leave him unless he or she should die. She is untidy; she has never decided what is truth; and she has her own affairs as well as his to manage; but, as he says himself, he has entertained an angel unawares and she is not to be thrust out. He covers his inability to command her by asking what she could do at her age if she had to leave. It is not likely that Mr Henry Jones could get the better of a woman whom—in spite of the fact that she has never decided what is truth—he has called an angel. For he did not use the word as a mere compliment, as much as to say that she was all that a woman should be when she is in domestic service. She is not; she is excellent only at pastry, which Mr Jones believes that he ought never to touch. He has been heard to call her “half angel and half bird”; but neither does this furnish the real explanation, though it offers an obvious one. For Ann is now—I mean that when we were children she seemed as old as she seems now; she limps too; and yet it might partly be her limp that made Mr Jones call her “half bird,” for it is brisk and quite unashamed, almost a pretty limp; also she is pale with a shining paleness, and often she is all eyes, because her eyes are large and round and dark, looking always up at you and always a little sidelong—but that alone would not justify a sensible man in calling her “half angel.” Nor would her voice, which has a remarkable unexpectedness, wherever and whenever it is heard. She begins abruptly in the middle of a thought without a word or gesture of preparation, and always on an unexpectedly high note. In this she is like the robin, who often rehearses the first half of his song in silence and then suddenly continues aloud, as if he were beginning in mid-song. Well, Mr Henry Jones, as I have said, once called her “half angel and half bird,” and declared that he had entertained an angel unawares in Ann, and I believe that he is right and more than a sensible man. For he has grasped the prime fact that she is not what she seems.
For my part I can say that she is such a woman that her name, Ann Lewis, has for those who connect it with her, and with her alone, out of all the inhabitants of earth, a curious lightness, something at once pretty and old with an elfish oldness, something gay and a little weird, also a bird-like delicacy, as delicate as “linnet” and “martin.” If these words are useless, remember at least that, though half bird, she is not a mere human travesty or hint of a winged thing, and that she is totally unlike any other bird, and probably unlike any other angel.
An ordinary bird certainly—and an ordinary angel probably—would have pined away at 21 Abercorran Street after having lived at Abercorran House and at Abercorran itself. But Ann is just the same as when I last saw her in Abercorran House. She alone that day was unchanged. The house, the Wilderness, the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, all were changed; I was changed, but not Ann. Yet the family had then newly gone, leaving her alone in the house. It was some years since I had been there. They had been going on as ever in that idle, careless, busy life which required a big country house and an illimitable playground of moor and mountain for a full and fitting display. Gradually their friends grew up, went to a university, to business, or abroad, and acquired preferences which were not easily to be adapted to that sunny, untidy house. At first these friends would be only too glad to go round to Abercorran House of an evening after business, or a morning or two after the beginning of the vacation. Perhaps they came again, and after a long interval yet again. They said it was different: but they were wrong; it was they themselves were different; the Morgans never changed. In this way young men of the neighbourhood discovered that they were no longer boys. They could no longer put up with that careless hullabaloo of lazy, cheerful people, they took offence at the laziness, or else at the cheerfulness. Also they saw that Jessie, the girl, was as frank and untidy at seventeen as she had always been, and it took them aback, especially if they were wanting to make love to her. The thought of it made them feel foolish against their will. They fancied that she would laugh. Yet it was easy to believe that Jessie might die for love or for a lover. When somebody was pitying the girl who drowned herself in the Wilderness pond, Jessie interrupted: “She isn’t a poor girl; she is dead; it is you are poor; she has got what she wanted, and some of you don’t know what you want, and if you did you would be afraid of cold water.” The young men could see the power of such words in Jessie’s eye, and they did not make love to her. Some took their revenge by calling her a slut, which was what Ann used to call her when she was affectionate, as she could be to Jessie only. “Come on, there’s a slut,” she used to say. It was too familiar for the youths, but some of them would have liked to use it, because they felt that the phrase was somehow as amorous as it was curt, a sort of blow that was as fond as a kiss. Even when, in their hard hats at the age of twenty or so, they used the term, in condemnation, they would still have given their hats for courage to speak it as Ann did, and say: “Come on, Jessie, there’s a slut”; for they would have had to kiss her after the word, both because they could not help it, and for fear she should misunderstand its significance. At any rate, I believe that nobody but Ann ever addressed that term of utmost endearment to Jessie.
Thus was there one reason the less for boys who were growing up, ceasing to tear the knees of their trousers and so on, to frequent Abercorran House. I lingered on, but the death of one there had set me painfully free. After a time I used to go chiefly to honour an old custom, which proved an inadequate motive. Then year after year, of course, it was easier to put off revisiting, and one day when I went, only Ann was left. She had her kitchen and her own room; the rest of the house had no visible inhabitants. Yet Ann would not have it that it was sad. “It does a house good,” she said, “to have all those Morgans in it. Now they have gone back again to Abercorran in the county of Caermarthen, and I am sure they are all happy but the mistress, and she was incurable; that was all; and there was an end of it at last.” Ann herself was staying on as caretaker till Abercorran House was let or sold.
In spite of old Ann and her kitchen fire I did not stay long in the house that day. The removal which had left it deserted and silent had made it also a little sordid: the family’s ways, for example, had not agreed with the wall-paper, and they had been no enemies to spiders. So I went out into the yard. There were no dogs; all had gone with the Morgans to Abercorran. The only life was a single homeless blue pigeon flying about in search of the home which had been sold. Ann said that almost every one of the birds had returned in this way, and she called the traveller into the kitchen to wait until its purchaser came in search of it. She told me who he was, and much more about the sale, which I forgot or never heard, because the sun shone very warmly into the yard just then, and I could not help seeing them all again, Jack and Roland, Lewis and Harry, and Jessie, and Philip, too, as he was at sixteen, and the dogs,—Ladas the greyhound, Bully the bull-terrier, Granfer the dachshund, Spot the fox-terrier, and pigeons here and there among them, and some perched on roof and chimneys, some flying so high that they were no bigger than larks—and Mr Morgan at the top of the steps looking at it all and seeing that it was good. Often had I come upon them in this pattern, not knowing at first whether to join this group or that, the busy or the idle.
In those days Abercorran House stood at the end of a short, quiet street which had only six houses in it, all on the right-hand side going up, all roomy and respectable, monuments of Albert the Good’s age, well covered with creepers, screened by a continuous line of lime-trees and in most cases by laurel, lilac, and balsam in compact shrubberies. Opposite the houses a high wall ran along until, at Abercorran House, the street was cut short by an oak fence. Behind that fence, and occupying as much ground as all the other houses and gardens together, lay the Abercorran garden, the Wilderness, which was bounded and given its triangular shape by a main road—now Harrington Road—and a farm lane. Impenetrable hedges and unscaleable fences protected the garden from the world.
I cannot say how it had come about that these three acres became attached to the house which so well deserved them. From the outside nobody would have suspected it. Abercorran House was in no practical respect superior to its neighbours; presumably the land beyond the fence was another property, or it would not have been allowed to cut short the street. But so it was. You entered the carriage gate on your right—there was no carriage—passed round the right side of the house into the yard at the back, turned to the left across it and went between the conservatory and the pigeon house out into the Wilderness.
The house was distinguished, to the casual eye, by the lack of coloured or white curtains, the never-shut gate, the flourishing, untended lilac hiding the front door and lower windows except in winter. But for me it is hard to admit that Abercorran House had anything in common, except building material, with the other five—The Elms, Orchard Lea, Brockenhurst, and Candelent Gate, and I forget the other. The street was called Candelent Street; God knows why, but there may be someone who knows as much about Candelent Gate as I do of Abercorran House.
These houses showed signs of pride and affluence. Their woodwork was frequently painted; the gravel was renewed; the knockers and letter-boxes gleamed; their inhabitants were always either neat or gaudy; even the servants were chosen half for their good looks, and were therefore continually being changed. At the Elms lived several people and a great Dane; at Orchard Lea a wire-haired terrier with a silver collar; at Candelent Gate a sort of whippet; at the house whose name I have forgotten, three pugs. These dogs all liked the Morgans’ house for one reason or another: men and dogs and food were always to be found there. The dogs’ owners never got so far up the street as that, though they sometimes sent to ask if Bunter the wire-haired terrier, or Lofty the Dane, or Silvermoon the whippet, were there, or to complain about one of some score of things which they disliked, as, for example, the conduct of the dogs (especially Bully, who was damned at first sight for his looks), the use of the hundred yards of roadway as a running ground, Jessie’s entering the races in a costume which enabled her to win, the noise of boys whistling at the pigeons, the number of the pigeons, the visits of almost verminous-looking strangers who had forgotten the name of the house and tried The Elms, or Candelent Gate, or Orchard Lea, or Brockenhurst, before discovering the Morgans. In return, Mr Morgan regretted the nature of things and the incompatibility of temperaments, and he forbade racing in the street; but as races were always an inspiration, they recurred. As for Jessie’s clothes, his opinion was that his neighbours, being fools, should look the other way or pull down their blinds. He did not see why Godiva should complain of Peeping Tom, or Peeping Tom of Godiva. As for the difficulty in remembering the name of the house, he saw no reason for changing it; all his friends and his children’s friends could see instantly that neither The Elms, nor Orchard Lea, nor Brockenhurst, nor Candelent Gate, nor the other house, was his, and he could not think of consulting those who were not his friends.
Abercorran House was honoured by four martins’ nests under the eaves, placed at such regular intervals that they appeared to be corbels for supporting the roof. Not one of the other houses in the street had a martin’s nest. But the distinguishing feature of the Morgans’ house was that you could see at a glance that it was the Morgans’. The front garden was merely a way round to the yard and the Wilderness. Altogether the front of the house, facing east, must have looked to a stranger uninhabited. Everything was done on the other side, or in the yard. Bounded on the east by the house, on the north or Brockenhurst side by a high wall (built by Mr Brockenhurst, as we called him), and on the west or lane side by a split oak fence, but separated from the Wilderness and the south only by the conservatory and the pigeon-house and some low railings, the yard of Abercorran House was a reservoir of sun. The high south wall was occupied, not by fruit trees, but by cascades of ivy and by men and boys standing or sitting in the sun, talking, watching the jackdaws coming and going in the elms of the Wilderness, and also by dogs gnawing bones or sleeping. There was no cultivated garden, but several of the corners had always some blossoms of wall-flower, sweet-rocket, or snapdragon, that looked after themselves: in the pocket between the fence and the pigeon house half a dozen sunflowers invariably found a way of growing eight feet high and expanding enormous blossoms, every one of them fit to be copied and stuck up for a sign outside the “Sun” inn.
Nobody could mistake Abercorran House; but in case anybody did, Mr Morgan had a brass plate with “T. Ll. Morgan” on it at the foot of his front steps, in a position where to see it from the road was impossible. This plate was always bright: the only time when I saw it dim was when Ann was alone in the deserted house. A succession of active, dirty, little maids employed in the house agreed upon this one point, that the name-plate must be polished until it reflected their cheeks as they reflected its never-understood glory. No vainglorious initial letters followed the name, nor any descriptive word. The maids—Lizz, Kate, Ellen, Polly, Hannah, Victoria, and the rest—probably knew no more than I ever did why the name was there. For it was perfectly clear that Mr Morgan never did or wished to do anything. The name might just as well have been that of some famous man born there a hundred years before: in any case it had nothing to do with that expression the house had of frankness, mystery, untidiness, ease, and something like rusticity. In the yard behind, the bull terrier stood for frankness, the greyhound for rusticity, the cats for mystery, and most things for untidiness, and all for ease.
Indoors it was a dark house. Windows were numerous, but it was undoubtedly dark. This was in part due to comparison with the outer air, where people lived as much as possible, and especially with the sunlit yard. The house had, however, a dark spirit, aided by the folds of heavy curtains, the massive, old, blackened furniture, and the wall-paper of some years before. You wandered as you pleased about it, alone or with Philip, Lewis, or Harry. Most of the rooms were bedrooms, but not conspicuous as such when strewn with cases of butterflies, birds’ eggs and nests, stuffed animals, cages containing foreign birds, several blackbirds, a nest of young thrushes, an adder and some ringed snakes and lizards, a hedgehog, white and piebald rats and mice, fishing-rods and tackle, pistols and guns and toy cannon, tools and half-made articles of many kinds, model steam-engines, a model of the “Victory” and a painting of the “Owen Glendower” under a flock of sail, boxing gloves, foils, odds and ends of wood and metal, curiosities from tree and stone, everything that can be accumulated by curious and unruly minds; and then also the owners themselves and their friends, plotting, arguing, examining their property, tending the living animals or skinning the dead, boxing, fencing, firing cannon, and going to and fro.
The kitchen, the Library, and Mrs Morgan’s room were silent rooms. In the kitchen Ann ruled. It smelt of an old Bible and new cakes: its sole sound was Ann’s voice singing in Welsh, which was often stopped abruptly by her duties coming to a head, or by something outside—as when she heard Lewis overtaxing Granfer in teaching it a trick and flitted out, saying: “Don’t use the dog like that. Anyone might think he had no human feelings.” She must have been, in a sense, young in those days, but was unlike any other young woman I have seen, and it never occurred to me then to think of her as one; nor, as certainly, did it seem possible that she would grow old—and she has not grown old. When she left her kitchen it was seldom to go out. Except to do the household shopping, and that was always after dark, she never went beyond the yard. She did not like being laughed at for her looks and accent, and she disliked London so much as to keep out the London air, as far as possible, with closed windows.
I do not remember ever to have seen Ann talking to her mistress, and no doubt she did without her. Mrs Morgan was not to be seen about the house, and her room was perfectly respected. She sat at the window looking on to the yard and watched the boys as she sewed, or read, or pretended to read. Sometimes Jessie sat with her, and then I have seen her smiling. She had large eyes of a gloomy lustre which looked as if they had worn their hollows in the gaunt face by much gazing and still more musing. The boys were silent for a moment as they went past her door. I do not know when she went out, if she ever did, but I never saw her even in the yard. Nor did I see her with Mr Morgan, and it was known that he was never in her sitting-room. She seemed to live uncomplaining under a weight of gloom, looking out from under it upon her strong sons and their busy indolence, with admiration and also a certain dread.
Jessie was the favourite child of father and mother, but I used to think that it was to avoid her father that she was so often in her mother’s room. Why else should such a child of light and liberty stay in that quietness and dark silence which breathed out darkness over the house? Outside that room she was her brothers’ equal in boldness, merriment and even in strength. Yet it once struck me with some horror, as she sat up at the window, that she was like her mother—too much like her—the dark eyes large, the cheeks not any too plump, the expression sobered either by some fear of her own or by the conversation; it struck me that she might some day by unimaginable steps reach that aspect of soft endurance and tranquilly expectant fear. At fifteen, when I best remember her, she was a tall girl with a very grave face when alone, which could break out with astonishing ease into great smiles of greeting and then laughter of the whole soul and body as she was lured to one group or another in the yard. She mixed so roughly and carelessly with every one that, at first, I, who had false picture-book notions of beauty and looked for it to have something proud and ceremonious in itself and its reception, did not see how beautiful she was. She took no care of her dress, and this made all the more noticeable the radiant sweetness of her complexion. But I recognised her beauty before long. One Saturday night she was shopping with Ann, and I met her suddenly face to face amidst a pale crowd all spattered with acute light and shadow from the shops. I did not know who it was, though I knew Ann. She was so extraordinary that I stared hard at her as people do at a foreigner, or a picture, or an animal, not expecting a look in answer. Others also were staring, some of the women were laughing. There could be no greater testimony to beauty than this laughter of the vulgar. The vulgar always laugh at beauty; that they did so is my only reason for calling these women by that hateful name. Jessie did not heed them. Then she caught sight of me, and her face lightened and blossomed with smiles. I shall not forget it, and how I blushed to be so saluted in that vile street. There was another reason why I should remember. Some of the big boys and young men—boys just leaving the Grammar School or in their first year at an office—winked at her as they passed; and one of them, a white-faced youth with a cigarette, not only winked but grinned as if he were certain of conquest. Jessie’s face recovered its grave look, she gave Ann her basket, and at the fullness of his leer she struck him in the mouth with all her force, splashing her small hand and his face with blood. I trembled and winced with admiration. Jessie burst into tears. The crowd was quiet and excited. Everybody seemed to be looking for somebody else to do they could not tell what. The crush increased. I saw Ann wiping Jessie’s hand. They were saved by a big red-faced working woman, who had a little husband alongside of her. She pushed very slowly but with great determination through the crowd, using her husband rather as an addition to her weight than as a brother in arms, until she came to the cluster of moody youths. Between us and them she stood, and hammering in her words with a projecting chin, told them to “Get home, you chalk-faced quill-drivers, and tell your mothers to suckle you again on milk instead of water. Then you can ask leave to look at girls, but not the likes of this beautiful dear, not you. Get home....” They laughed awkwardly and with affected scorn as they turned away from that face on fire; and it was laughing thus that they realised that they were blocking the traffic, and therefore dispersed muttering a sort of threats, the woman keeping up her attack until it could not be hoped that they heard her. As we hurried home we were hooted by similar boys and by some of the young women who matched them.
We were proud of Jessie in this attitude, which made her father call her “Brynhild” or “Boadicea.” When she was with her mother she was “Cordelia:” when she nursed a cat or fed the pigeons she was “Phyllis,” by which I suppose he meant to express her gentleness. From that Saturday night I admired everything about her, down to her bright teeth, which were a little uneven, and thus gave a touch of country homeliness to her beauty. Very few girls came to Abercorran House to see Jessie, partly because she was impatient of very girlish girls, partly because they could not get on with her brothers. And so, with all her sweet temper—and violence that came like a tenth wave—she was rather alone; just as her face dropped back to gravity so completely after laughter, so I think she returned to solitude very easily after her romps. Was it the shadow of London upon her, or of her mother’s room? She went back to Wales too seldom, and as for other holidays, the charming sophisticated home-counties were nothing to the Morgans, nor the seaside resorts. Jessie should have had a purer air, where perhaps she would never have sung the song beginning, “O the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird,” and ending with the chorus:
“Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she singeth as she flies:
She bringeth good tidings, she telleth no lies.”
Sometimes she was willing to sing all three verses and repeat the first to make a fourth and to please herself:
“Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she singeth as she flies:
She bringeth good tidings, she telleth no lies:
She sucketh sweet flowers, for to keep her voice clear;
And the more she singeth cuckoo, the summer draweth near.”
When she came to those last two lines I looked at her very hard, inspired by the thought that it was she had sucked dew out of the white flowers of April, the cuckoo-flower, the stitchwort, the blackthorn, and the first may, to make her voice clear and her lips sweet. While she sang it once Mr Stodham—a clerk somewhere who had seen a naked Dryad—bent his head a little to one side, perfectly motionless, the eyes and lips puckered to a perfect attention, at once eager and passive, so that I think the melody ran through all his nerves and his veins, as I am sure he was inviting it to do. I heard him telling Mr Morgan afterwards that he wanted to cry, but could not, it was not in his family.
That was in Mr Morgan’s own room, the library, the largest room in the house, where Mr Stodham had gone to escape the boys for a time. When Mr Morgan was not at the top of the steps which led down to the yard, smoking a cigar and watching the boys, the dogs, and the pigeons, and looking round now and then to see if Jessie would come, he was in the library sitting by the big fire with a cigar and a book. If anyone entered he put the book on his knee, shifted the cigar to the middle of his mouth, removed his spectacles, and looked at us without a word. Then with a nod he replaced book, cigar, and spectacles, and ignored us. We spoke in whispers or not at all as we coasted the high book-shelves lining every part of each wall, except in one corner, where there were several guns, an ivory-handled whip, and a pair of skates. The books were on the whole grim and senatorial. We felt them vaguely—the legal, the historical, and the classical tiers—to be our accusers and judges. There were also many sporting books, many novels, plays, poems, and romances of
“Old loves and wars for ladies done by many a lord.”
If we took some of these down they were not to be read in the library. We laid one on our knees, opened a page, but glanced up more than once the while at Mr Morgan, and then either replaced it or put it under an arm and ran off with it on tiptoe. “Stay if you like, boys,” said Mr Morgan as we reached the door; and immediately after, “Shut the door quietly. Good-bye.”
At most gatherings and conversations Mr Morgan listened in silence, except when appealed to for a fact or a decision, or when he laughed—we often did not know why—and dropped his cigar, but caught it in some confusion at his waist. He was a lean man of moderate height and very upright, a hawk’s profile, a pointed brown beard, cheeks weathered and worn, and the heaviest-lidded eyes possible without deformity. He stood about with one hand in his coat pocket, the other holding a newspaper or an opened book. The dogs loved him and leaped up at him when he appeared, though he took small notice of them. When we met him in the street he always had a slow horseman’s stride, was wrapped in a long overcoat and deep in thought, and never saw us or made any sign. At home, though he was a severe-looking man of grave speech, he accepted the irregularities and alarums without a murmur, often with a smile, sometimes, as I have said, with laughter, but that was a little disconcerting. It was on questions of sport and natural history that he was most often asked for a judgment, which he always gave with an indifferent air and voice, yet in a very exact and unquestionable manner. But they were the frankest family alive, and there was nothing which the elder boys would not discuss in his presence or refer to him—except in the matter of horse-racing. Jack and Roland, the two eldest sons, betted; and so, as we all knew, did Mr Morgan; but the father would not say one word about a horse or a race, unless it was a classical or curious one belonging to the past.
One day as I was passing the library door with a pair of swan’s wings belonging to Philip, Mr Morgan stepped out. The look which he gave to the wings and to me compelled me to stop, and he said:
“You have a pair of wild swans there, Arthur.”
I said I had.
“Swan’s wings,” he repeated. “Swan’s wings;” and as he uttered the words his body relaxed more than ordinary, until the middle of his back was supported against the wall, his feet and face stuck out towards me.
“Did you know,” said he, “that some women had swan’s wings with which to fly?”
Now I had heard of swan maidens, but he distinctly said “women,” and the tone of his voice made me feel that he was not referring to the flimsy, incredible creatures of fairy tales, but to women of flesh and blood, of human stature and nature, such women as might come into the library and stand by Mr Morgan’s fire—only, so far as I knew, no women ever did. So I said “No.”
“They have,” said he, “or they had in the young days of Elias Griffiths, who was an old man when I was a lad.”
Here he sighed and paused, but apologised, though not exactly to me, by saying: “But that”—meaning, I suppose, the sigh—“is neither here nor there. Besides, I must not trespass in Mr Stodham’s province.” For Mr Stodham was then passing, and I made way for him.
Mr Morgan continued:
“It was on a Thursday....”
Now I held Mr Morgan in great respect, but the mention of Thursday at the opening of a story about swan maidens was too much for me.
“Why Thursday?” I asked.
“I agree with the boy,” remarked Mr Stodham, leaving us and the talk of swan maidens and Thursday.
Thursday was a poor sort of a day. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, were all noticeable days in some way, though not equally likeable. Friday, too, as, ushering in Saturday and the end of the week, had some merit. Wednesday, again, was a half holiday. But least of all was to be said for Thursday. Mr Morgan’s answer was:
“I said it was on a Thursday, because it was on a Thursday and not on any other day. I am sorry to see that the indolent spirit of criticism has resorted to you. Pluck it out, my boy.... Give me those wings.... They are beautiful: I expect the ferryman shot the swans in the estuary at Abercorran.... However, they are not large enough....”
He was looking carefully at the wings, thinking things which he could not say to me, and I said nothing. Then, handing me back the wings, he went on:
“It was on a Thursday, a very stormy one in December, that two young men who lived with their old mothers a mile or two inland went down to the rocks to shoot with their long, ancient guns. They shot some trash. But the wind for the most part snatched the birds from the shot or the shot from the birds, and they could not hold their guns still for cold. They continued however, to walk in and out among the rocks, looking for something to prevent them saving their gunpowder. But they saw nothing more until they were close to a creek that runs up into the cliff and stops you unless you have wings. So there they stopped and would have turned back, if one of them had not gone to the very edge of the creek wall and looked down. He levelled his gun instantly, and then dropped it again. His companion coming up did the same. Two white swans—not gray ones like this—were just alighting upon the sand below, and before the eyes of the young men they proceeded to lay aside their wings and entered the water, not as swans, but as women, upon that stormy Thursday. They were women with long black hair, beautiful white faces and—Have you seen the statues at the Museum, my boy? Yes, you have; and you never thought that there was anything like them outside of marble. But there is. These women were like them, and they were not of marble, any more than they were of what I am made of.” His own skin was coloured apparently by a mixture of weather and cigar smoke. “These women were white, like the moon when it is neither green nor white. Now those young men were poor and rough, and they were unmarried. They watched the women swimming and diving and floating as if they had been born in the sea. But as it began to darken and the swimmers showed no signs of tiring, the young men made their way down to the swans’ wings to carry them off. No sooner had they picked up the wings than the two women hastened towards them into the shallow water, crying out something in their own tongue which the men could not even hear for the roar of winds and waters. As the women drew nearer, the men retreated a little, holding the wings behind them, but keeping their eyes fixed on the women. When the women actually left the water the men turned and made for home, followed by the owners of the wings. They reached their cottages in darkness, barred the doors, and put away the wings.
But the wingless ones knocked at the doors, and cried out until the old mothers heard them. Then the sons told their tale. Their mothers were very wise. Fumbling to the bottom of their chests they found clothes suitable for young women and brides, and they opened their doors. They quieted the women with clothes for wings, and though they were very old they could see that the creatures were beautiful as their sons had said. They took care that the wings were not discovered.
Those young men married their guests, and the pairs lived happily. The sons were proud of their wives, who were as obedient as they were beautiful. Said the old women: Anybody might think they still had their wings by their lightsome way of walking. They made no attempt to get away from the cottages and the smell of bacon. In fact, they were laughed at by the neighbours for their home-keeping ways; they never cared to stay long or far from home, or to see much of the other women. When they began to have children they were worse than ever, hardly ever leaving the house and never parting from their children. They got thin as well as pale; a stranger could hardly have told that they were not human, except for the cold, greenish light about them and their gait which was like the swimming of swans.
In course of time the old women died, having warned their sons not to let their wives on any account have the wings back. The swan-women grew paler and yet more thin. One of them, evidently in a decline, had at length to take to her bed. Here for the first time she spoke of her wings. She begged to be allowed to have them back, because wearing them, she said, she would certainly not die. She cried bitterly for the wings, but in vain. On her deathbed she still cried for them, and took no notice of the minister’s conversation, so that he, in the hope of gaining peace and a hearing, advised her husband to give way to her. He consented. The wings were taken out of the chest where they had been exchanged for a wedding garment years before; they were as white and unruffled as when they lay upon the sand. At the sight of them the sick woman stood up in her bed with a small, wild cry. The wings seemed to fill the room with white waves; they swept the rush-light away as they carried the swan out into the wind. All the village heard her flying low above the roofs towards the sea, where a fisherman saw her already high above the cliffs. It was the last time she was seen.
The other swan-wife lingered for a year or two. A sister of her husband’s kept house in her place. Whether this woman had not heard the story or did not believe it, I do not know. One day, however, she discovered the wings and gave them to the children to play with. As one child came in soon afterwards crying for his mother and the wings at the same time, it was certain that she also had taken flight to some place more suitable for wild swans. They say that two generations of children of these families were famous for the same beautiful walking as their mothers, whom they never saw again....” Here Mr Morgan paused for a moment then added: “I wonder why we never hear of swan-men?”
I was not much impressed at the time by the story and his dry way of telling it. What I liked most was the idea that two ordinary men went shooting on a Thursday in mid-winter and caught swan-maidens bathing in a pool on the Welsh coast and married them. So I said to Mr Morgan:
“Why did you ever leave Wales, Mr Morgan?”
He put a new cigar severely between his teeth and looked at me as if he did not know or even see me. I ran off with the wings to Philip.
I alone was listening to the swan story, but it would have been more in accordance with the custom of the house if it had been told in a large company out in the yard—in one of the bedrooms—in the library itself—or in the dining-room (where there was a vast sideboard bearing a joint, cheese, bread, fruit, cakes, and bottles of ale, to which the boys or the visitors resorted, for meals without a name, at all hours of the day). Most often the yard and the steps leading down to it were the meeting-place. The pigeons, the conservatory, with its bicycles, a lathe and all sorts of beginnings and remains, the dogs, above all the sun and the view of the Wilderness, attracted everyone to the yard as a common centre for the Morgans and those who gathered round one or other of them. Thus, for example, the pigeons did not belong to the Morgans at all, but to one Higgs, who was unable to keep them at his home. He was always in and out of the yard, frequently bringing friends who might or might not become friends of the family. Everyone was free to look at the pigeons, note which had laid and which had hatched, to use the lathe, to take the dogs out if they were willing, to go upstairs and see the wonders—the eggs of kites, ravens, buzzards, curlews, for example, taken by Jack and Roland near Abercorran—and to have a meal at the sideboard or a cup of tea from one of Ann’s brews in the kitchen. Jack and Roland in themselves attracted a large and mixed company. Jack, the eldest, was a huge, brown-haired, good-natured fellow, with his father’s eyes, or rather eyelids. He was very strong, and knew all about dogs and horses. He was a good deal away from the house, we did not know where, except that it was not at an office or other place where they work. Roland was tall, black-haired, dark-eyed like his mother, and as strong as Jack. He was handsome and proud-looking, but though quick-tempered was not proud in speech with us lesser ones. His learning was equal to Jack’s, and it comprised also the theatre; he was dressed as carefully as Jack was carelessly, but like Jack would allow the pigeons to perch anywhere upon him. Both wore knickerbockers and looked like country gentlemen in exile. Jack smoked a clay pipe, Roland cigarettes. They were very good friends. Though they did no work, one or other of them was often at the lathe. They boxed together while we stood round, admiring Jack because he could never be beaten, and Roland because no one but his brother could have resisted him. They were sometimes to be seen looking extremely serious over a sporting paper. Lewis and Harry were a similar pair many years younger, Lewis, the elder, broader, shorter, and fairer of the two, both of them stiff and straight like their elders. They also had begun to acquire trains of adherents from the various schools which they had irregularly and with long intervals attended. They treated the streets like woods, and never complained of the substitute. Once or twice a year they went to a barber to have their black and brown manes transformed into a uniform stubble of less than half an inch. Midway between these two pairs came Philip, and a little after him Jessie.
These six attracted every energetic or discontented boy in the neighbourhood. Abercorran House was as good as a mountain or a sea-shore for them, and was accessible at any hour of the day or night, “except at breakfast time,” said Mr Stodham—for there was no breakfast-time. Mr Stodham was a middle-aged refugee at Abercorran House, one for whom breakfast had become the most austere meal of the day, to be taken with a perfectly adjusted system of times and ceremonies, in silence, far from children and from all innovation, irregularity, and disorder. Therefore the house of the Morgans was for him the house that had no breakfast-time, and unconsciously he was seeking salvation in the anarchy which at home would have been unendurable. Mr Stodham was not the only client who was no longer a boy, but he and the few others were all late converts; for, as I have mentioned, boys forsook Abercorran House as they grew up. Parents, too, looked foul-favouredly on the house. The family was irregular, not respectable, mysterious, in short unprofitable. It may have got about that when Mr Morgan once received a fountain-pen as a gift, he said he did not want any of “your damned time-saving appliances.” Of course, said he, some people could not help saving time and money—let them—they were never clever enough to know what to do with them, supposing that their savings were not hidden out of their reach like their childhood—but it had not occurred to him to do either, so he gave the pen to the little milk-boy, advising him to give it away before it got a hold on him. This child had delighted Mr Morgan by coming up the street every day, singing a filthy song. It was a test of innocence, whether the words of it did or did not make the hearer wish that either he or the singer might sink instantaneously into the earth. Mr Morgan did not like the song at all. The words were in no way better than those of a bad hymn, nor was the tune. But he liked what he called the boy’s innocence. Ophelia only sang “By Gis and by Saint Charity” under cover of madness. At the worst this boy made no pretence. Mr Morgan argued, probably, that one who had such thoughts would not have the impudence to sing so except to a select audience; he had no doubt of this when the boy sang it once on being asked to in the Library. I do not know what happened, beyond this, that Mr Morgan looked as if he had been crying, and the boy never sang it again. If this got about, few could think any better of the Morgans at Abercorran House. Moreover, the window frames and doors were never painted, and the front gate remained upright only because it was never closed; and on any sunny day a man passing down the lane was sure of hearing men and boys laughing, or Jessie singing, and dogs barking or yawning, pigeons courting, over the fence.
We recalled many memories, Ann and I, as we stood in the empty and silent, but still sunlit yard, on my last visit. At one moment the past seemed everything, the present a dream; at another, the past seemed to have gone for ever. Trying, I suppose, to make myself believe that there had been no break, but only a gradual change, I asked Ann if things at Abercorran House had not been quieter for some time past.
“Oh no,” said she, “there was always someone new dropping in, and you know nobody came twice without coming a hundred times. We had the little Morgans of Clare’s Castle here for more than a year, and almost crowded us out with friends. Then Mr—whatever was his name—the Italian—I mean the Gypsy—Mr Aurelius—stayed here three times for months on end, and that brought quite little children.”
“Of course it did, Ann. Aurelius.... Don’t I remember what he was—can it be fifteen years ago? He was the first man I ever met who really proved that man is above the other animals as an animal. He was really better than any pony, or hound, or bird of prey, in their own way.”
“Now you are talking, Mr Froxfield—Arthur, I should say.”
“I suppose I am, but Aurelius makes you talk. I remember him up in the Library reading that Arabian tale about the great king who had a hundred thousand kings under him, and what he liked most was to read in old books about Paradise and its wonders and loveliness. I remember Aurelius saying: And when he came upon a certain description of Paradise, its pavilions and lofty chambers and precious-laden trees, and a thousand beautiful and strange things, he fell into a rapture so that he determined to make its equal on earth.”
“He is the first rich man I ever heard of that had so much sense,” said Ann. “Perhaps Aurelius would have done like that if he had been as rich as sin, instead of owing a wine-and-spirit merchant four and six and being owed half-a-crown by me. But he does not need it now, that is, so far as we can tell.”
“What, Ann, is Aurelius dead?”
“That I cannot say. But we shall never see him again.”
“Why frighten me for nothing? Of course he will turn up: he always did.”
“That is impossible.”
“Why?”
“He promised Mr Torrance he would write and wait for an answer every Midsummer day, if not oftener, wherever he might be. He has now missed two Midsummers, which he would not do—you know he could not do such a thing to Mr Torrance—if he was in his right mind. He wasn’t young, and perhaps he had to pay for keeping his young looks so long.”
“Why? How old could he be?” I said quickly, forgetting how long ago it was that I met him first.
“I know he is fifty,” said Ann.
I did not answer because it seemed ridiculous and I did not want to be rude to Ann. I should have said a moment before, had I been asked, that he was thirty. But Ann was right.
“Where was he last heard of, Ann?”
“I went myself with little Henry Morgan and Jessie to a place called Oatham, or something like it, where he last wrote from. He had been an under-gardener there for nearly two years, and we saw the man and his wife who let him a room and looked after him. They said he seemed to be well-off, and of course he would. You know he ate little, smoked and drank nothing, and gave nothing to any known charities. They remembered him very well because he taught them to play cards and was very clean and very silent. ‘As clean as a lady,’ she said to Jessie, who only said, ‘Cleaner.’ You know her way. The man did not like him, I know. He said Aurelius used to sit as quiet as a book and never complained of anything. ‘He never ate half he paid for, I will say that,’ said he. ‘He was too fond of flowers, too, for an under-gardener, and used to ask why daisies and fluellen and such-like were called weeds. There was something wrong with him, something on his conscience perhaps.’ The squire’s agent, a Mr Theobald, said the same when he came in. He thought there was something wrong. He said such people were unnecessary. Nothing could be done with them. They were no better than wild birds compared with pheasants, even when they could sing, which some of them could do, but not Aurelius. They caused a great deal of trouble, said my lord the agent of my lord the squire, yet you couldn’t put them out of the way. He remarked that Aurelius never wrote any letters and never received any—that looked bad, too. ‘What we want,’ said he—‘is a little less Theobald,’ said Jessie, but the man didn’t notice her. ‘What we want is efficiency. How are we to get it with the likes of this Mr What’s-his-name in the way? They neither produce like the poor nor consume like the rich, and it is by production and consumption that the world goes round, I say. He was a bit of a poacher, too. I caught him myself letting a hare out of a snare—letting it out, so he said. I said nothing to the squire, but the chap had to go.’ And that’s all we shall hear about Aurelius,” said Ann. “He left there in the muck of February. They didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t care, though he provided them with gossip for a year to come. The woman asked me how old he was. Before I could have answered, her husband said: ‘About thirty I should say.’ The woman could not resist saying snappily: ‘Fifty’....”
Aurelius was gone, then. It cannot have surprised anyone. What was surprising was the way he used to reappear after long absences. While he was present everyone liked him, but he had something unreal about him or not like a man of this world. When that squire’s agent called his under-gardener a superfluous man, he was a brute and he was wrong, but he saw straight. If we accept his label there must always have been some superfluous men since the beginning, men whom the extravagant ingenuity of creation has produced out of sheer delight in variety, by-products of its immense processes. Sometimes I think it was some of these superfluous men who invented God and all the gods and godlets. Some of them have been killed, some enthroned, some sainted, for it. But in a civilisation like ours the superfluous abound and even flourish. They are born in palace and cottage and under hedges. Often they are fortunate in being called mad from early years; sometimes they live a brief, charmed life without toil, envied almost as much as the animals by drudges; sometimes they are no more than delicate instruments on which men play melodies of agony and sweetness.
The superfluous are those who cannot find society with which they are in some sort of harmony. The magic circle drawn round us all at birth surrounds these in such a way that it will never overlap, far less become concentric with, the circles of any other in the whirling multitudes. The circle is a high wall guarded as if it were a Paradise, not a Hell, “with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms”: or it is no more than a shell border round the garden of a child, and there is no one so feeble but he can slip over it, or shift it, or trample it down, though powerless to remove it. Some of these weaker ones might seem to have several circles enclosing them, which are thus upset or trampled one by one as childhood advances. Everybody discovers that he can cross their borders. They do not retaliate. These are the superfluous who are kept alive to perform the most terrible or most loathsome tasks. Rarely do their tyrants see their eyes gleaming in their dungeons, and draw back or hurl a stone like a man who has almost trodden upon a fox.
But the superfluous are not always unfortunate; we who knew Aurelius would never call him unfortunate. There are some—and more than ever in these days when even the strongest do not condemn outright, and when deaths less unpleasant to the executioner have been discovered—some who escape the necessity to toil and spin for others, and do not spend their ease in manacles. Many of the women among the hunted are not slaughtered as soon as caught. They are kept in artfully constructed and choicely decorated cages where their captors try to force them to sing over and over again the notes which were their allurement at first; a few survive to wear white locks and trouble with a new note the serenity of the palaces where their cages are suspended. The superfluous have been known to learn the ways of their superiors, to make little camps unmolested in the midst of the foreign land, to enjoy a life admired of many and sometimes envied, but insincerely.
Some of the captives enslave their masters. Aurelius was one. From my earliest days Aurelius and rumours of him were much about me. Once he earned his bread in a great country house by looking after the books and writing letters. They lodged, fed, and clothed him, and gave him a small wage—he came from no one knew where, except that it must have been a gutter or a ditch, as he said, “between the moon and Mercury.” But he would tell children that he was begotten out of the moonlight by an owl’s hooting, or that he was born in a tent in the New Forest, where there were more leaves than money. It was a sort of grievance against him that he could always buy what he wanted, as a book for himself or a toy for a child.
He can have been of little use as a letter-writer, as I see now. His writing looked as unfamiliar as Persian, and must have been laborious. It was suited to the copying of incantations, horoscopes, receipts for confectionery. It must often have startled the reader like a line of trees or flight of birds writing their black legend on the dawn silver. There was nothing in the meaning of his sentences, I think, to correspond with the looks of them. A few of his letters survive, and some notes on accessions to the library, etc.; but it is clear that they were written in a language foreign to the man, a loose journalistic English of the moment, neither classic nor colloquial, and they have no significance.
Some people called him a little man, but in his size as in other things he seemed rather to be of another species than a diminutive example of our own. He was smaller than a man, but not unpleasantly small, neither were his hands too long and delicate, nor were they incapable of a man’s work. In every way he was finely made and graceful, with clear large features, curled dark-brown hair and beard almost auburn. His clothes were part of him, of a lighter brown than his hair and of some substance which was more like a natural fur than a made cloth. These clothes, along with his voice, which was very deep, his hair, and his silent movements, increased his pleasing inhumanity. He sat among many people and said trivial things, or more often nothing, looking very far away and very little, turning all light somehow to moonlight, his dark eyes full of subdued gleaming; and both speech and silence drew upon him an attention which gave the casual observer an excuse for calling him vain. Children liked him, though he never troubled to show a liking for children, and while we sat on his lap or displayed a book for him he would be talking busily to others, but without offending us. He did not often tell us tales or play games with us, but he had a swift, gentle way of putting his hand on our heads and looking at us which always seemed an honour.
I recall chiefly, in connection with Aurelius, an evening near the end of winter at the great house. There had been a week of frost, some days silent and misty, others loud and clear with a north-east wind. Then came the west wind, a day’s balmy sun, and at last rain. This day I recall was the next. It was full of goings to and fro of loose cloud, of yellow threatenings on the hills. The light was thin and pale, falling tenderly over green fields and their fresh sprinkling of mole-heaps. But the rain would not descend, and as we got to the big house for tea the sky cleared, and in the twilight blackbirds were chinking nervously before sleep and now and then hurrying across the dim grass between the dark hedges and copses. A robin sang at the edge of a holly, and a thrush somewhere remote, and the world had become narrow and homely, the birds sounded secure like happily tired boys lazily undressing, and evidently they did not expect men. Three-quarters of a moon hung at the zenith, cold and fresh and white like an early spring flower. We grew silent, but at tea were particularly noisy and excited, too excited and near to tears, when I rushed upstairs. In the library I found Aurelius reading, with his back to the uncurtained window, by a light that only illuminated his face and page. Running at first to the window, I pressed my face on the pane to see the profound of deepening night, and the lake shining dimly like a window through which the things under the earth might be seen if you were out. The abyss of solitude below and around was swallowing the little white moon and might swallow me also; with terror at this feeling I turned away. “What?” said Aurelius, without even looking round, but apparently aware of my feeling. Seated in his lap, he took hardly more notice of me, but I was comforted. His silence was not a mere absence of words. It was not the peevish silence of one too cautious or too fearful to speak; nor the silence of one who has suddenly become isolated and feels it, yet cannot escape. Up out of the silence rose the voice of Aurelius reading out of the book before him. Over my shoulder came the rustling of ivy, and the sighing of trees, and the running of the brook through the coomb; the moon, close at hand, out in the black garden, pressed her face against the window and looked in at me. Aurelius was reading of that great king who had under him a hundred thousand kings, and whose chief delight was in ancient books telling of the loveliness of Paradise: “And when he met with this description of the world to come, and of Paradise and its pavilions, its lofty chambers, its trees and fruits, and of the other things in Paradise, his heart enticed him to construct its like on earth....” The world extended to a vastness that came close up to me and enfolded me as a lake enfolds one swan. Thus at the building of that Paradise I easily imagined doorways that would have admitted Orion and the Pleiades together. And at last, at the cry of destruction, though I was sorry, I was intensely satisfied with both the sadness and the splendour. I began to dream in the following silence. I dreamed I was lying at the edge of an immense sea, upon a rock scarcely raised above the water of the colour of sapphires. I saw go by me a procession of enormous seals whose backs swelled out of the wavelets like camels, and as they passed in deep water, a few yards away, each one cast on me his dark soft eyes, and they were the eyes of Aurelius. There were more coming behind when I awoke. Aurelius lighted another lamp. I went over again to the window and looked out. In a flash I saw the outer vast world of solitude, darkness, and silence, waiting eternally for its prey, and felt behind me the little world within that darkness like a lighthouse. I went back to the others. Aurelius for all I knew went to the kingdoms of the moon.
Many times again he read to us after I had on some pretext brought him to Abercorran House, a year or two later.
Yet older people said that Aurelius had no perception of religion, or beauty, or human suffering. Certainly he talked of these things, as I see now, with a strange and callous-seeming familiarity, as a poultry-farmer talks of chickens; but our elders did not explain it when they called it in scorn artistic. I suspect it was in scorn, though they said it was to humanise him, that they helped to get him married to a “nice sensible” girl who never came near Abercorran House. Like many other women, she had been used to petting him as if he were an animal. He responded with quaint, elaborate speeches and gestures, kneeling to speak, calling her by different invented names, but perhaps with a mock-heroic humorous gleam. He married her, and all I know is that he slipped away from the charming flat where the kindness of friends had deposited them, and never reappeared in the neighbourhood except at Abercorran House. He sent her money from time to time which he earned as trainer to a troupe of dogs in a travelling circus, as a waiter, as a commercial traveller of some sort. It was said that he had been to sea. In any case, to hear him sing
“Along the plains of Mexico”
was better than sailing in any ship we had ever been in or imagined. I am sure that he could not have improved his singing of “Along the Plains of Mexico” by sailing from Swansea to Ilfracombe or round Cape Horn, or by getting a heart of oak and a hand of iron. He brought nothing back with him from his travels. He had no possessions—not a book, not a watch, not an extra suit of clothes, not a lead pencil. He could live on nothing, and at times, it was said, had done so. For his hardiness was great, and habitually he ate almost nothing. Man, God, and weather could not harm him. Of course he was sometimes put upon, for he would not quarrel. For having treated him better than he appeared to have expected, some people could hardly forgive themselves until they learned to take it as creditable. One tremendous tradesman, for instance, explained his comparative civility to Aurelius on a trying occasion by blustering: “You never know where you are with these Gypsies:” he came, however, to regard himself as a benefactor. A minister of the gospel who was tricked by Aurelius’ innocence had to fall back on accusing him of concealing his age and of being a Welshman. Everyone thought him a foreigner.
It was a remarkable thing that nobody except a few children and Mr Torrance the schoolmaster—for actually one schoolmaster frequented Abercorran House—liked to be alone with Aurelius. I never heard this spoken of, and I believe nobody consciously avoided being alone with him. Only, it so happened that he was welcomed by a company, but not one member of it was likely to stay on long if at last he found himself and Aurelius left behind by the others. Meeting him in the street, no one ever stopped for more than a few words with him. Some awkwardness was feared, but not in Aurelius, who was never awkward. Unsympathetic people called him a foreigner, and there was something in it. In no imaginable crowd could he have been one of the million “friends, Romans, countrymen!” Perhaps even at Abercorran House he was not quite one of us. Yet in a moment he was at home there. I can see him holding a pigeon—in the correct manner—spreading out one of its wings and letting it slip back again, while he was talking, as luck would have it, to Higgs the bird-chap who cared for nothing but pigeons. Higgs was so taken aback by the way the new-comer talked and held the bird—a man whom he would instinctively have laughed at—that he could not say a word, but escaped as soon as possible and blundered about saying: “I like the little chap.... You can see he’s used to birds—who would have thought it?—and I wondered what it was young Arthur was bringing in.” Higgs was so pleased with his own discernment, his cleverness in seeing good in that unlikely place, that he really exaggerated his liking for Aurelius. However, let it be set down to Higgs’ credit that he knew a hawk from a handsaw, and hailed Aurelius almost at first sight.
As I have mentioned, Aurelius had asked me to take him to Abercorran House, because I had attracted his fancy with something I had said about the Morgans or the house. It was a lucky introduction. For all liked him, and he was soon free to stay at the house for a night or a month, at pleasure. It was one of his virtues to admire Jessie. He must have felt at once that she was alone among women, since he never knelt to her or made any of his long, lofty speeches to her as to other fair women whom he met elsewhere, as at my home. She saw his merit instantly. To please him she would go on and on singing for him “The Cuckoo,” “Midsummer Maid,” “Hob-y-deri-dando,” “Crockamy Daisy Kitty-alone.”
When for a time he was a bookseller’s assistant in London, it was Jessie discovered him, as she was passing with her mother at night. She said he was standing outside like one of those young men in “The Arabian Nights” who open a stall in a market at Bagdad because they hope to capture someone long-lost or much-desired among their customers. But he soon wearied of dry goods, and was not seen after that for over a year, though Mr Torrance brought word that he had written from Dean Prior in Devonshire, where (he said) a great poet lived who would have been sorry to die in 1674 if he had known he was going to miss Aurelius by doing so. Which may be absurd, but Mr Torrance said it, and he knew both Herrick and Aurelius extremely well. He did try to explain the likeness, but to an audience that only knew Herrick as the author of “Bid me to live” and as an immoral clergyman, and at this distance of time I cannot reconstruct the likeness. But it may have been that Aurelius wrote verses which Mr Torrance, in the kindness of his heart, believed to resemble Herrick’s. I know nothing of that. The nearest to poetry I ever saw of his was a pack of cards which he spent his life, off and on, in painting. Jessie was one of the Queens, and rightly so. That this pack was found in the cottage where he stayed before he finally disappeared, proves, to me at any rate, that he regarded this life as at an end.
“It was a good day, Arthur, that first brought you to Abercorran House,” said old Ann, as she went to the door to deliver the stray pigeon to its owner.
“Yes,” I said, a little pathetically for Ann’s taste and with thought too deep for tears, at least in her company. I looked round the kitchen, remembering the glory that was Abercorran ... Philip ... Jessie ... Roland ... Aurelius.... It was no unselfish memory, for I wished with all my heart that I was fifteen again, that the month was April, the hour noon, and the scene the yard of Abercorran House with all the family assembled, all the dogs, Aurelius, and Mr Torrance (there being still some days left of the Easter holidays), yes, and Higgs also, and most certainly the respectable Mr Stodham.
“Yes, it was a good day,” continued Ann, returning, “if it had not been for you we should never have known Aurelius.”
This was so like the old Ann that I was delighted, with all my conceit. I remembered that first visit well, limping into the yard the day after the paper-chase, and seeing big Jack (aged then about twenty) and tall Roland (less than two years younger) discussing a greyhound with a blackguard in an orange neck-tie, Jessie (my own age) surrounded by pigeons, Mr Morgan and Mr Torrance at the top of the steps looking on, and away on the pond under the elms little Harry and Lewis crying for help to release their craft from the water-lilies of that perilous sea. When the limper was introduced as “Arthur,” Mr Torrance said:
“Not that same Arthur, that with spear in rest
Shot through the lists at Camelot and charged
Before the eyes of ladies and of kings,”
and Mr Morgan roared with laughter, as having no cigar he was free to do at the moment, and everyone else joined in except the Gypsy, who appeared to think he was the victim; such laughter was a command. Before the roar was over Ann came up to me and said: “Will you please to come into the kitchen. I have something for that poor leg of yours.” Pity was worse than ever, but to escape the laughter, I followed her. “There you are,” she said as we entered, pointing to a broad blackberry tart uncut, “that will do your leg good. It is between you and Philip.” And with that she left me and at another door in came Philip, and though there was nothing wrong with his leg he enjoyed the tart as much as I did.
We were then friends of twenty-four hours standing, my age being ten, his twelve, and the time of the year an October as sweet as its name. We had been for six months together at the same school without speaking, until yesterday, the day of the paper-chase. After running and walking for more than two hours that sunny morning we found ourselves together, clean out of London and also out of the chase, because he had gone off on a false scent and because I ran badly.
I had never before been in that lane of larches. It was, in fact, the first time that I had got out of London into pure country on foot. I had been by train to sea-side resorts and the country homes of relatives, but this was different. I had no idea that London died in this way into the wild.
Out on the broad pasture bounded by a copse like a dark wall, rooks cawed in the oak-trees. Moorhens hooted on a hidden water behind the larches. At the end of a row of cottages and gardens full of the darkest dahlias was a small, gray inn called “The George,” which my companion entered. He came out again in a minute with bread and cheese for two, and eating slowly but with large mouthfuls we strolled on, too busy and too idle to talk. Instead of larches horse-chestnuts overhung our road; in the glittering grass borders the dark fruit and the white pods lay bright. So as we ate we stooped continually for the biggest “conquers” to fill our pockets. Suddenly the other boy, musing and not looking at me, asked, “What’s your name?” “Arthur Froxfield,” I answered, pleased and not at all surprised. “It doesn’t suit you,” he said, looking at me. “It ought to be John something—
‘John, John, John,
With the big boots on.’
You’re tired.”
I knew his name well enough, for at twelve he was the best runner in the school. Philip Morgan.... I do not suppose that I concealed my pride to be thus in his company.
For an hour we were separated; we hit upon the trail, and off he went without a word. At a limping trot I followed, but lost sight of Philip and soon fell back into a walk. I had, in fact, turned homewards when he overtook me; he had been forced to retrace his steps. I was by this time worn out, and should have given up but for my self-satisfaction at the long run and the pleasure of knowing that he did not mind my hanging on his arm as on we crawled. Thus at last after an age of sleepy fatigue I found myself at home. It had been arranged that on the next day I was to go round to Abercorran House.
Again and again Philip and I revisited that lane of larches, the long water-side copse, the oak wood out in the midst of the fields, and all the hedges, to find moorhen’s eggs, a golden-crested wren’s, and a thousand treasures, and felicity itself. Philip had known this country for a year or more; now we always went together. I at least, for a long time, had a strong private belief that the place had been deserted, overlooked, forgotten, that it was known only to us. It was not like ordinary country. The sun there was peculiarly bright. There was something unusual in the green of its grass, in the caw of its rooks in April, in the singing of its missel-thrushes on the little round islands of wood upon the ploughland. When later on I read about those “remote and holy isles” where the three sons of Ulysses and Circe ruled over the glorious Tyrrhenians, I thought, for some reason or another, or perhaps for no reason, of those little round islands of ash and hazel amidst the ploughland of Our Country, when I was ten and Philip twelve. If we left it unvisited for some weeks it used to appear to our imaginations extraordinary in its beauty, and though we might be forming plans to go thither again before long, I did not fully believe that it existed—at least for others—while I was away from it. I have never seen thrushes’ eggs of a blue equalling those we found there.
No wonder Our Country was supernaturally beautiful. It had London for a foil and background; what is more, on that first day it wore an uncommon autumnal splendour, so that I cannot hope to meet again such heavily gilded elms smouldering in warm, windless sunshine, nor such bright meadows as they stood in, nor such blue sky and such white billowy cloud as rose up behind the oaks on its horizon.
Philip knew this Our Country in and out, and though his opinion was that it was not a patch on the country about his old home at Abercorran, he was never tired of it. In the first place he had been introduced to it by Mr Stodham. “Mr Stodham,” said Philip, “knows more about England than the men who write the geography books. He knows High Bower, where we lived for a year. He is a nice man. He has a horrible wife. He is in an office somewhere, and she spends his money on jewellery. But he does not mind; remember that. He has written a poem and father does not want him to recite it. Glory be to Mr Stodham. When he trespasses they don’t say anything, or if they do it is only, ‘Fine day, sir,’ or ‘Where did you want to go to, sir,’ or ‘Excuse me, sir, I don’t mind your being on my ground, but thought you mightn’t be aware it is private.’ But if they catch you or me, especially you, being only eleven and peagreen at that, we shall catch it.”
Once he was caught. He was in a little copse that was all blackthorns, and the blackthorns were all spikes. Inside was Philip looking for what he could find; outside, and keeping watch, sat I; and it was Sunday. Sunday was the only day when you ever saw anyone in Our Country. Presently a man who was passing said: “The farmer’s coming along this road, if that’s any interest to you.” It was too late. There he was—coming round the bend a quarter of a mile off, on a white pony. I whistled to Philip to look out. I was innocently sitting in the same place when the farmer rode up. He asked me at once the name of the boy in the copse, which so took me by surprise that I blabbed out at once. “Philip Morgan,” shouted the farmer, “Philip Morgan, come out of that copse.” But Philip was already out of it, as I guessed presently when I saw a labourer running towards the far end, evidently in pursuit. The farmer rode on, and thinking he had given it up I followed him. However, five minutes later Philip ran into his arms at a gateway, just as he was certain he had escaped, because his pursuer had been outclassed and had given up running. In a few minutes I joined them. Philip was recovering his breath and at the same time giving his address. If we sent in five shillings to a certain hospital in his name, said the farmer, he would not prosecute us—“No,” he added, “ten shillings, as it is Sunday.” “The better the day the better the deed,” said Philip scornfully. “Thank you, my lad,” said the giver of charity, and so we parted. But neither did we pay the money, nor were we prosecuted; for my father wrote a letter from his official address. I do not know what he said. In future, naturally, we gave some of our time and trouble to avoiding the white pony when we were in those parts. Not that he got on our nerves. We had no nerves. No: but we made a difference. Besides, his ground was really not in what we called Our Country, par excellence. Our own country was so free from molestation that I thought of it instantly when Aurelius read to me about the Palace of the Mountain of Clouds. A great king had asked his counsellors and his companions if they knew of any place that no one could invade, no one, either man or genie. They told him of the Palace of the Mountain of Clouds. It had been built by a genie who had fled from Solomon in rebellion. There he had dwelt until the end of his days. After him no one inhabited it; for it was separated by great distances and great enchantment from the rest of the world. No one went thither. It was surrounded by running water sweeter than honey, colder than snow, and by fruitful trees. And there in the Palace of the Mountain of Clouds the king might dwell in safety and solitude for ever and ever....
In the middle of the oak wood we felt as safe and solitary as if we were lords of the Palace of the Mountain of Clouds. And so we were. For four years we lived charmed lives. For example, when we had manufactured a gun and bought a pistol, we crawled over the ploughed fields at twilight, and fired both at a flock of pewits. Yet neither birds nor poachers suffered. We climbed the trees for the nests of crows, woodpeckers, owls, wood-pigeons, and once for a kestrel’s, as if they were all ours. We went everywhere. More than once we found ourselves among the lawns and shrubberies of big houses which we had never suspected. This seems generally to have happened at twilight. As we never saw the same house twice the mysteriousness was increased. One of the houses was a perfect type of the dark ancient house in a forest. We came suddenly stumbling upon it among the oaks just before night. The walls were high and craggy, and without lights anywhere. A yew tree grew right up against it. A crow uttered a curse from the oak wood. And that house I have never seen again save in memory. There it remains, as English as Morland, as extravagantly wild as Salvator Rosa. That evening Philip must needs twang his crossbow at the crow—an impossible shot; but by the grace of God no one came out of the house, and at this distance of time it is hard to believe that men and women were actually living there.
Most of these estates had a pond or two, and one had a long one like a section of a canal. Here we fished with impunity and an untroubled heart, hoping for a carp, now and then catching a tench. But often we did not trouble to go so far afield. Our own neighbourhood was by no means unproductive, and the only part of it which was sacred was the Wilderness. None of the birds of the Wilderness ever suffered at our hands. Without thinking about it we refrained from fishing in the Wilderness pond, and I never saw anybody else do so except Higgs, but though it seemed to me like robbing the offertory Higgs only grinned. But other people’s grounds were honoured in a different way. Private shrubberies became romantic at night to the trespasser. Danger doubled their shadows, and creeping amongst them we missed no ecstasy of which we were capable. The danger caused no conscious anxiety or fear, yet contrived to heighten the colour of such expeditions. We never had the least expectation of being caught. Otherwise we should have had more than a little fear in the January night when we went out after birds, armed with nets and lanterns. The scene was a region of meadows, waiting to be built on and in the meantime occupied by a few horses and cows, and a football and a lawn-tennis club. Up and down the hedges we went with great hopes of four and twenty blackbirds or so. We had attained a deep and thrilling satisfaction but not taken a single bird when we were suddenly aware of a deep, genial voice asking, “What’s the game?” It was a policeman. The sight acted like the pulling of a trigger—off we sped. Having an advantage of position I was the first to leap the boundary hedge into the road, or rather into the ditch between hedge and road. Philip followed, but not the policeman. We both fell at the jump, Philip landing on top of me, but without damage to either. We reached home, covered in mud and secret glory, which made up for the loss of a cap and two lanterns. The glory lasted one day only, for on the next I was compelled to accompany my father to the police-station to inquire after the cap and lanterns. However, I had the honour of hearing the policeman say—though laughing—that we had taken the leap like hunters and given him no chance at all. This and the fact that our property was not recovered preserved a little of the glory.
In these meadows, in the grounds which their owners never used at night, and in Our Country, Philip and I spent really a great deal of time, fishing, birds-nesting, and trying to shoot birds with cross-bow, pistol, or home-made gun. There were intervals of school, and of football and cricket, but these in memory do not amount to more than the towns of England do in comparison with the country. As on the map the towns are but blots and spots on the country, so the school-hours were embedded, almost buried away, in the holidays, official, semi-official, and altogether unofficial. Philip and I were together during most of them; even the three principal long holidays of the year were often shared, either in Wales with some of Philip’s people, or at Lydiard Constantine, in Wiltshire, with my aunt Rachel.
One day at Abercorran House I heard Aurelius, Mr Morgan, and Mr Torrance in the Library, talking about wool-gathering. “Since Jessie told us about that river in Essex with the Welsh name,” said Mr Morgan, laughing, “we have travelled from Gwithavon to Battersea Park Road and a fishmonger’s advertisement. Such are the operations of the majestic intellect. How did we get all that way? Do you suppose the cave-men were very different, except that they did not trouble about philology and would have eaten their philologers, while they did without fishmongers because fish were caught to eat, not to sell, in those days?”
“Well!” said Aurelius, “we could not live if we had nothing in common with the cave-men. A man who was a mere fishmonger or a mere philologer could not live a day without artificial aid. Scratch a philologer sufficiently hard and you will find a sort of a cave-man.”
“I think,” continued Mr Morgan, “that we ought to prove our self-respect by going soberly back on our steps to see what by-ways took us out of Gwithavon to this point.”
“I’m not afraid of you at that game,” said Aurelius. “I have often played it during church services, or rather after them. A church service needs no further defence if it can provide a number of boys with a chance of good wool-gathering.”
“Very true,” said Mr Torrance, who always agreed with Aurelius when it was possible. A fancy had struck him, and instead of turning it into a sonnet he said: “I like to think that the original wool-gatherers were men whose taste it was to wander the mountains and be before-hand with the nesting birds, gathering stray wool from the rocks and thorns, a taste that took them into all sorts of wild new places without over-loading them with wool, or with profit or applause.”
“Very pretty, Frank,” said Aurelius, who had himself now gone wool-gathering and gave us the benefit of it. He told us that he had just recalled a church and a preacher whose voice used to enchant his boyhood into a half-dream. The light was dim as with gold dust. It was warm and sleepy, and to the boy all the other worshippers seemed to be asleep. The text was the three verses of the first chapter of Genesis which describe the work of creation on the fifth day. He heard the clergyman’s voice murmuring, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
“That was enough,” said Aurelius, “for me it was all the sermon. It summoned up before me a coast of red crags and a black sea that was white where the waves got lost in the long corridors between the crags. The moon, newly formed to rule the night, stood full, large, and white, at the top of the sky, which was as black as the sea and cloudless. And out of the water were rising, by twos and threes, but sometimes in multitudes like a cloud, the birds who were to fly in the open firmament of heaven. Out of the black waste emerged sea-birds, one at a time, their long white wings spread wide out at first, but then as they paused on the surface, uplifted like the sides of a lyre; in a moment they were skimming this way and that, and, rising up in circles, were presently screaming around the moon. Several had only risen a little way when, falling back into the sea, they vanished, there, as I supposed, destined by the divine purpose to be deprived of their wings and to become fish. Eagles as red as the encircling crags came up also, but always solitary; they ascended as upon a whirlwind in one or two long spirals and, blackening the moon for a moment, towered out of sight. The little singing birds were usually cast up in cloudlets, white and yellow and blue and dappled, and, after hovering uncertainly at no great height, made for the crags, where they perched above the white foam, piping, warbling, and twittering, after their own kinds, either singly or in concert. Ever and anon flocks of those who had soared now floated downward across the moon and went over my head with necks outstretched, crying towards the mountains, moors, and marshes, or sloped still lower and alighted upon the water, where they screamed whenever the surface yawned at a new birth of white or many-coloured wings. Gradually the sea was chequered from shore to horizon with birds, and the sky was throbbing continually with others, so that the moon could either not be seen at all, or only in slits and wedges. The crags were covered, as if with moss and leaves, by lesser birds who mingled their voices as if it were a dawn of May....”
In my turn I now went off wool-gathering, so that I cannot say how the fifth day ended in the fancy of Aurelius, if you call it fancy. It being then near the end of winter, that vision of birds set me thinking of the nests to come. I went over in my mind the eggs taken and to be taken by Philip and me at Lydiard Constantine. All of last year’s were in one long box, still haunted by the cheapest scent of the village shop. I had not troubled to arrange them; there was a confusion of moor-hens’ and coots’ big freckled eggs with the lesser blue or white or olive eggs, the blotted, blotched, and scrawled eggs. For a minute they were forgotten during the recollection of a poem I had begun to copy out, and had laid away with the eggs. It was the first poem I had ever read and re-read for my own pleasure, and I was copying it out in my best hand-writing, the capitals in red ink. I had got as far as “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest.” I tried to repeat the verses but could not, and so I returned to the eggs. I thought of April when we should once again butt our way through thickets of stiff, bristling stems, through thorn and briar and bramble in the double hedges. We should find the thrushes’ nests in a certain copse of oak and blackthorn where the birds used hardly anything but moss, and you could see them far off among the dark branches, which seldom had many leaves, but were furred over with lichens. We would go to all those little ponds shadowed by hazels close to the farms, where there was likely to be a solitary moorhen’s home, and up into the pollard willow which once had four starling’s eggs at the bottom of a long narrow pocket. In all those spring days we had no conscious aim but finding nests, and if we were not scrambling in a wood we walked with heads lifted up to the trees, turned aside to the hedges, or bent down to the grass or undergrowth. We were not curious about the eggs; questions of numbers or variation in size, shape or colour, troubled us but fitfully. Sun, rain, wind, deep mud, water over the boots and knees, scratches to arms, legs, and face, dust in the eyes, fear of gamekeepers and farmers, excitement, dizziness, weariness, all were summed up by the plain or marked eggs in the scent box; they were all that visibly remained of these things, and I valued them in the same way and for the same reason as the athlete valued the parsley crown. The winning of this one or that was recalled with regret, sometimes that I had taken more than I should have done from the same nest, sometimes that I had not taken as many as would have been excusable; I blushed with annoyance because we had not revisited certain nests which were unfinished or empty when we discovered them—the plough-boys doubtless had robbed them completely, or they had merely produced young birds. How careless the country boys were, putting eggs into their hats and often forgetting all about them, often breaking them wantonly. I envied them their opportunities and despised them for making so little use of them.
I thought of the flowers we tramped over, the smell and taste of cowslips and primroses, and various leaves, and of the young brier shoots which we chewed and spat out again as we walked. I do not know what Aurelius might have been saying, but I began to count up the Sundays that must pass before there would be any chance of finding rooks’ eggs, not at Lydiard, but at the rookery nearest to Abercorran House. Thus I was reminded of the rookery in the half-dozen elms of a farm-house home field, close by the best fishing-place of all at Lydiard. There the arrow-headed reeds grew in thick beds, and the water looked extraordinarily mysterious on our side of them, as if it might contain fabulous fish. Only last season I had left my baited line out there while I slipped through the neighbouring hedge to look for a reed-bunting’s nest; and when I returned I had to pull in an empty line which some monster had gnawed through, escaping with hooks and bait. I wonder Philip did not notice. It was just there, between the beds of arrow-head and that immense water dock on the brink. I vowed to try again. Everybody had seen the monster, or at least the swirl made as he struck out into the deeps at a passing tread. “As long as my arm, I daresay,” said the carter, cracking his whip emphatically with a sort of suggestion that the fish was not to be caught by the like of us. Well, we shall see.
As usual the idea of fishing was connected with my aunt Rachel. There was no fishing worth speaking of unless we stayed with her in our holidays. The water in the ponds at Lydiard Constantine provoked magnificent hopes. I could have enjoyed fishing by those arrow-heads without a bait, so fishy did it look, especially on Sundays, when sport was forbidden:—it was unbearable to see that look and lack rod and line. The fascinating look of water is indescribable, but it enables me to understand how
“Simple Simon went a-fishing
For to catch a whale,
But all the water he had got
Was in his mother’s pail.”
I have seen that look in tiny ponds, and have fished in one against popular advice, only giving it up because I caught newts there and nothing else.
But to my wool-gathering. In the Library, with Aurelius talking, I could see that shadowed water beside the reeds and the float in the midst. In fact I always had that picture at my command. We liked the water best when it was quite smooth; the mystery was greater, and we used to think that we caught more fish out of it in this state. I hoped it would be a still summer, and warm. It was nearly three quarters of a year since last we were in that rookery meadow—eight months since I had tasted my aunt’s doughy cake. I can see her making it, first stoning the raisins while the dough in a pan by the fire was rising; when she thought neither of us was looking she stoned them with her teeth, but this did not shock me, and now I come to think of it they were very white even teeth, not too large or too small, so that I wonder no man ever married her for them alone. I am glad no man did marry her—at least, I was glad then. For she would probably have given up making doughy cakes full of raisins and spices, if she had married. I suppose that what with making cakes and wiping the dough off her fingers, and wondering if we had got drowned in the river, she had no time for lovers. She existed for those good acts which are mostly performed in the kitchen, for supplying us with lamb and mint sauce, and rhubarb tart with cream, when we came in from birds-nesting. How dull it must be for her, thought I, sitting alone there at Lydiard Constantine, the fishing over, the birds not laying yet, no nephews to be cared for, and therefore no doughy cakes, for she could not be so greedy as to make them for herself and herself alone. Aunt Rachel lived alone, when she was without us, in a little cottage in a row, at the edge of the village. Hers was an end house. The rest were neat and merely a little stained by age; hers was hidden by ivy, which thrust itself through the walls and up between the flagstones of the floor, flapped in at the windows, and spread itself so densely over the panes that the mice ran up and down it, and you could see their pale, silky bellies through the glass—often they looked in and entered. The ivy was full of sparrows’ nests, and the neighbours were indignant that she would not have them pulled out; even we respected them.
To live there always, I thought, would be bliss, provided that Philip was with me, always in a house covered with ivy and conducted by an aunt who baked and fried for you and tied up your cuts, and would clean half a hundred perchlings for you without a murmur, though by the end of it her face and the adjacent windows were covered with the flying scales. “Why don’t you catch two or three really big ones?” she would question, sighing for weariness, but still smiling at us, and putting on her crafty-looking spectacles. “Whew, if we could,” we said one to another. It seemed possible for the moment; for she was a wonderful woman, and the house wonderful too, no anger, no sorrow, no fret, such a large fire-place, everything different from London, and better than anything in London except Abercorran House. The ticking of her three clocks was delicious, especially very early in the morning as you lay awake, or when you got home tired at twilight, before lamps were lit. Everything had been as it was in Aunt Rachel’s house for untold time; it was natural like the trees; also it was never stale; you never came down in the morning feeling that you had done the same yesterday and would do the same to-morrow, as if each day was a new, badly written line in a copy-book, with the same senseless words at the head of every page. Why couldn’t we always live there? There was no church or chapel for us—Philip had never in his life been to either. Sunday at Lydiard Constantine was not the day of grim dulness when everyone was set free from work, only to show that he or she did not know what to do or not to do; if they had been chained slaves these people from Candelent Street and elsewhere could not have been stiffer or more savagely solemn.
Those adult people were a different race. I had no thought that Philip or I could become like that, and I laughed at them without a pang, not knowing what was to save Philip from such an end. How different from those people was my aunt, her face serene and kind, notwithstanding that she was bustling about all day and had trodden her heels down and had let her hair break out into horns and wisps.
I thought of the race of women and girls. I thought (with a little pity) that they were nicer than men. I would rather be a man, I mused, yet I was sure women were better. I would not give up my right to be a man some day; but for the present there was no comparison between the two in my affections; and I should not have missed a single man except Aurelius. Nevertheless, women did odd things. They always wore gloves when they went out, for example. Now, if I put gloves on my hands, it was almost as bad as putting a handkerchief over my eyes or cotton wool in my ears. They picked flowers with gloved hands. Certainly they had their weaknesses. But think of the different ways of giving an apple. A man caused it to pass into your hands in a way that made it annoying to give thanks; a woman gave herself with it, it was as if the apple were part of her, and you took it away and ate it in peace, sitting alone, thinking of nothing. A boy threw an apple at you as if he wanted to knock your teeth out with it, and, of course, you threw it back at him with the same intent; a girl gave it in such a way that you wanted to give it back, if you were not somehow afraid. I began thinking of three girls who all lived near my aunt and would do anything I wanted, as if it was not I but they that wanted it. Perhaps it was. Perhaps they wanted nothing except to give. Well, and that was rather stupid, too.
Half released from the spell by one of the voices in the Library, I turned to a dozen things at once—as what time it was, whether one of the pigeons would have laid its second egg by now, whether Monday’s post would bring a letter from a friend who was in Kent, going about the woods with a gamekeeper who gave him squirrels, stoats, jays, magpies, an owl, and once a woodcock, to skin. I recalled the sweet smell of the squirrels; it was abominable to kill them, but I liked skinning them.... I turned to thoughts of the increasing row of books on my shelf. First came The Compleat Angler. That gave me a brief entry into a thinly populated world of men rising early, using strange baits, catching many fish, talking to milkmaids with beautiful voices and songs fit for them. The book—in a cheap and unattractive edition—shut up between its gilded covers a different, embalmed, enchanted life without any care. Philip and I knew a great deal of it by heart, and took a strong fancy to certain passages and phrases, so that we used to repeat out of all reason “as wholesome as a pearch of Rhine,” which gave a perfect image of actual perch swimming in clear water down the green streets of their ponds on sunny days.... Then there were Sir Walter Scott’s poems, containing the magic words—
“And, Saxon, I am Rhoderick Dhu.”
Next, Robinson Crusoe, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Iliad, a mass of almost babyish books, tattered and now never touched, and lastly The Adventures of King Arthur and the Round Table. I heard the Lady of the Lake say to Merlin (who had a face like Aurelius) “Inexorable man, thy powers are resistless”: moonlit waters overhung by mountains, and crags crowned by towers, boats with mysterious dark freight; knights taller than Roland, trampling and glittering; sorceries, battles, dragons, kings, and maidens, stormed or flitted through my mind, some only as words and phrases, some as pictures. It was a shadow entertainment, with an indefinable quality of remoteness tinged by the pale Arthurian moonlight and its reflection in that cold lake, which finally suggested the solid comfort of tea at my aunt’s house, and thick slices, “cut ugly,” of the doughy cake.
At this point Jessie came in to say that tea was ready. “So am I,” said I, and we raced downstairs. Jessie won.
Once or twice I joined Philip on a holiday in Wales, but not at Abercorran. It was years later that I found myself by chance at Abercorran and saw enough of it to spoil somewhat the beautiful fantastic geography learned from a thousand references by Philip, Jessie, and old Ann. The real place—as it may be seen by anyone who can pay the railway fare—is excellent, but I think I should never have gone there had I foreseen its effect on that old geography. Having seen the place with these eyes I cannot recover perfectly the original picture of the castle standing at the meet of two small rivers and looking over their wide estuary, between the precipices of enormous hills, to the sea; the tiny deserted quay, the broken cross on the open space glistening with ever-renewed cockle shells, below the castle; the long, stately street leading from the church down to the castle, named Queen Street because an English queen once rode down it; the castle owls and the inexhaustible variety and the everlasting motion of the birds of the estuary. To see it as the Morgans once made me see it you must be able to cover the broad waters with glistening white breasts, at the same moment that its twin precipices abide in gloom that has been from the beginning; you must hear an undertone of the age of Arthur, or at least of the great Llewelyn, in the hoots of the castle owls, and give a quality of kingliness to a street which has a wide pavement on one side, it is true, but consists for the most part of cottages, with a castle low down at one end, and at the other a church high up.
The Morgans’ old house, far above the townlet of Abercorran, had windows commanding mountains behind as well as sea in front. Their tales had given me, at the beginning, an idea of mountains, as distinct from those objects resembling saw teeth by which they are sometimes represented. They formed the foundation of my idea of mountains. Then upon that I raised slowly a magnificent edifice by means of books of travel and of romance. These later elements were also added unto the Welsh mountains where Jack found the kite’s nest, where Roland saw an eagle, where Philip had learnt the ways of raven, buzzard, and curlew, of badger, fox, and otter. My notions of their size had been given to me by Ann, in a story of two men who were lost on them in the mist. For three days the men were neither seen nor heard in their wanderings; on the fourth they were discovered by chance, one dead, the other mad. These high solitudes, I thought, must keep men wild in their minds, and still more I thought so after hearing of the runaway boy from Ann’s own parish. He lived entirely out of doors—without stealing, said Ann—for a year and a half. Every now and then someone caught sight of him, but that was all the news. He told nothing when he was arrested on the charge of setting fire to a rick. Ann said that if he did this it was an accident, but they wanted to get rid of the scandal of the “wild boy,” so they packed him off to a training ship until he was sixteen. “He would have thought it a piece of luck,” said Ann, “to escape from the ship, however it was, for he thought it worse than any weather on the mountains; and before he was sixteen he did escape—he fell overboard by some mercy, and was never seen again on sea or land, my children.”
But above all other tales of the mountains was the one that had David Morgan for hero. David Morgan was the eldest brother of the Morgans of Abercorran House. He had been to London before ever the family thought of quitting their Welsh home; in a year’s time he had returned with an inveterate melancholy. After remaining silent, except to his mother, for some months, he left home to build himself a house up in the mountains. When I was at Abercorran, Morgan’s Folly—so everybody called it—was in ruins, but still made a black letter against the sky when the north was clear. People imagined that he had hidden gold somewhere among the rocks. He was said to have worshipped a god who never entered chapel or church. He was said to speak with raven and fox. He was said to pray for the end of man or of the world. Atheist, blasphemer, outlaw, madman, brute, were some of the names he received in rumour. But the last that was positively known of him was that, one summer, he used to come down night after night, courting the girl Angharad who became his wife.
One of his obsessions in solitude, so said his mother when I travelled down with her to see the last of him, was a belief in a race who had kept themselves apart from the rest of men, though found among many nations, perhaps all. The belief may have come from the Bible, and this was the race that grew up alongside the family of Cain, the guiltless “daughters of men” from whom the children of the fratricides obtained their wives. These, untainted with the blood of Cain, knew not sin or shame—so his belief seems to have been—but neither had they souls. They were a careless and a godless race, knowing not good or evil. They had never been cast out of Eden. “In fact,” said Mrs Morgan, “they must be something like Aurelius.” Some of the branches of this race had already been exterminated by men; for example, the Nymphs and Fauns. David Morgan was not afraid of uttering his belief. Others of them, he said, had adopted for safety many of men’s ways. They had become moorland or mountain men living at peace with their neighbours, but not recognised as equals. They were to be found even in the towns. There the uncommon beauty of the women sometimes led to unions of violent happiness and of calamity, and to the birth of a poet or musician who could abide neither with the strange race nor with the children of Adam. They were feared but more often despised, because they retained what men had lost by civilisation, because they lived as if time was not, yet could not be persuaded to believe in a future life.
Up in his tower Morgan came to believe his own father one of this people, and resolved to take a woman from amongst them for a wife. Angharad, the shy, the bold, the fierce dark Angharad whose black eyes radiated light and blackness together, was one of them. She became his wife and went up with him to the tower. After that these things only were certainly known; that she was unhappy; that when she came down to the village for food she was silent, and would never betray him or fail to return; and that he himself never came down, that he also was silent and with his unshorn hair looked like a wild man. He was seen at all hours, usually far off, on the high paths of the mountains. His hair was as black as in boyhood. He was never known to have ailed, until one day the wild wife knocked at a farm-house door near Abercorran, asking for help to bring him where he might be looked after, since he would have no one in the tower but her. The next day Mrs Morgan travelled down to see her son. When she asked me to accompany her I did so with some curiosity; for I had already become something of a stranger at Abercorran House, and had often wondered what had become of David Morgan up on his tower. His mother talked readily of his younger days and his stay in London. Though he had great gifts, some said genius, which he might have been expected to employ in the study, he had applied himself to direct social work. For a year he laboured “almost as hard,” he said, “as the women who make our shirts.” But gradually he formed the opinion that he did not understand town life, that he never could understand the men and women whom he saw living a town life pure and simple. Before he came amongst them he had been thinking grandly about men without realising that these were of a different species. His own interference seemed to him impudent. They disgusted him, he wanted to make them more or less in his own image to save his feelings, which, said he, was absurd. He was trying to alter the conditions of other men’s lives because he could not have himself endured them, because it would have been unpleasant to him to be like them in their hideous pleasure, hideous suffering, hideous indifference. In this attitude, which altogether neglected the consolations and even beauty and glory possible or incident to such a life, he saw a modern Pharisaism whose followers did not merely desire to be unlike others, but to make others like themselves. It was, he thought, due to lack of the imagination and sympathy to see their lives from a higher or a more intimate point of view, in connection with implicit ideals, not as a spectacle for which he had an expensive seat. Did they fall farther short of their ideals than he from his? He had not the power to see, but he thought not; and he came to believe that, lacking as their life might be in familiar forms of beauty and power, it possessed, nevertheless, a profound unconsciousness and dark strength which might some day bring forth beauty—might even now be beautiful to simple and true eyes—and had already given them a fitness to their place which he had for no place on earth. When it was food and warmth which were lacking he never hesitated to use his money, but beyond satisfying these needs he could not feel sure that he was not fancifully interfering with a force which he did not understand and could not overestimate. Therefore, leaving all save a little of his money to be spent in directly supplying the needs of hungry and cold men, he escaped from the sublime, unintelligible scene. He went up into the tower that he had built on a rock in his own mountains, to think about life before he began to live. Up there, said his mother, he hoped to learn why sometimes in a London street, beneath the new and the multitudinous, could be felt a simple and a pure beauty, beneath the turmoil a placidity, beneath the noise a silence which he longed to reach and drink deeply and perpetuate, but in vain. It was his desire to learn to see in human life, as we see in the life of bees, the unity, which perhaps some higher order of beings can see through the complexity which confuses us. He had set out to seek at first by means of science, but he thought that science was an end, not a means. For a hundred years, he said, men had been reading science and investigating, as they had been reading history, with the result that they knew some science and some history. “So he went up into his tower, and there he has been these twelve years,” said Mrs Morgan, “with Angharad and no comforts. You would think by his letters that his thoughts had become giddy up there. Only five letters have I had from him in these twelve years. This is all,” she added, showing a small packet in her handbag. “For the last six years nobody has heard from him except Ann. He wished he had asked Ann to go with him to the tower. She would have gone, too. She would have preserved him from being poetical. It is true he was only twenty-five years old at the time, but he was too poetical. He said things which he was bound to repent in a year, perhaps in a day. He writes quite seriously, as actors half seriously talk, in tones quite inhumanly sublime.” She read me scraps from these old letters, evidently admiring as well as disapproving:
“I am alone. From my tower I look out at the huge desolate heaves of the grey beacons. Their magnitude and pure form give me a great calm. Here is nothing human, gentle, disturbing, as there is in the vales. There is nothing but the hills and the silence, which is God. The greater heights, set free from night and the mist, look as if straight from the hands of God, as if here He also delighted in pure form and magnitude that are worthy of His love. The huge shadows moving slowly over the grey spaces of winter, the olive spaces of summer, are as God’s hand....
“While I watch, the dream comes, more and more often, of a Paradise to be established upon the mountains when at last the wind shall blow sweet over a world that knows not the taint of life any more than of death. Then my thought sweeps rejoicing through the high Gate of the Winds that cleaves the hills—you could see it from my bedroom at Abercorran—far off, where a shadow miles long sleeps across the peaks, but leaves the lower wild as yellow in the sunlight as corn....
“Following my thought I have walked upwards to that Gate of the Winds, to range the high spaces, sometimes to sleep there. Or I have lain among the gorse—I could lie on my back a thousand years, hearing the cuckoo in the bushes and looking up at the blue sky above the mountains. In the rain and wind I have sat against one of the rocks in the autumn bracken until the sheep have surrounded me, shaggy and but half visible through the mist, peering at me fearlessly, as if they had not seen a man since that one was put to rest under the cairn above; I sat on and on in the mystery, part of it but not divining, so that I went disappointed away. The crags stared at me on the hill-top where the dark spirits of the earth had crept out of their abysses into the day, and, still clad in darkness, looked grimly at the sky, the light, and at me....
“More and more now I stay in the tower, since even in the mountains as to a greater extent in the cities of men, I am dismayed by numbers, by variety, by the grotesque, by the thousand gods demanding idolatry instead of the One I desire, Whose hand’s shadow I have seen far off....
“Looking on a May midnight at Algol rising from behind a mountain, the awe and the glory of that first step into the broad heaven exalted me; a sound arose as of the whole of Time making music behind me, a music as of something passing away to leave me alone in the silence, so that I also were about to step off into the air....”
“Oh,” said Mrs Morgan, “it would do him good to do something—to keep a few pigeons, now. I am afraid he will take to counting the stones in his tower.” She continued her quotations:
“The moon was rising. The sombre ranges eastward seemed to be the edge of the earth, and as the orb ascended, the world was emptied and grieved, having given birth to this mighty child. I was left alone. The great white clouds sat round about on the horizon, judging me. For days I lay desolate and awake, and dreamed and never stirred.”
“You see,” said Mrs Morgan, “that London could not cure him. He says:
“‘I have visited London. I saw the city pillared, above the shadowy abyss of the river, on columns of light; and it was less than one of my dreams. It was Winter and I was resolved to work again in Poplar. I was crossing one of the bridges, full of purpose and thought, going against the tide of the crowd. The morning had a low yellow roof of fog. About the heads of the crowd swayed a few gulls, inter-lacing so that they could not be counted. They swayed like falling snow and screamed. They brought light on their long wings, as the ship below, setting out slowly with misty masts, brought light to the green and leaden river upon the foam at her bows. And ever about the determined, careless faces of the men swayed the pale wings, like wraiths of evil and good, calling and calling to ears that know not what they hear. And they tempted my brain with the temptation of their beauty: I went to and fro to hear and to see them until they slept and the crowd had flowed away. I rejoiced that day, for I thought that this beauty had made ready my brain, and that on the mountains at last I should behold the fulness and the simplicity of beauty. So I went away without seeing Poplar. But there, again, among the mountains was weariness, because I also was there.’”
“Why is he always weary?” asked Mrs Morgan plaintively, before reading on:
“But not always weariness. For have I not the company of planet and star in the heavens, the same as bent over prophet, poet, and philosopher of old? By day a scene unfolds as when the first man spread forth his eyes and saw more than his soul knew. These things lift up my heart sometimes for days together, so that the voices of fear and doubt are not so much in that infinite silence as rivulets in an unbounded plain. The sheer mountains, on some days, seem to be the creation of my own lean terrible thoughts, and I am glad: the soft, wooded hills below and behind seem the creation of the pampered luxurious thought which I have left in the world of many men....
“Would that I could speak in the style of the mountains. But language, except to genius and simple men, is but a paraphrase, dissipating and dissolving the forms of passion and thought....
“Again Time lured me back out of Eternity, and I believed that I longed to die as I lay and watched the sky at sunset inlaid with swart forest, and watched it with a dull eye and a cold heart....”
“And they think he is an atheist. They think he has buried gold on the mountain,” exclaimed Mrs Morgan, indignantly.
Little she guessed of the nights before her in the lone farmhouse with her bewildered son and the wild Angharad. While he raved through his last hours and Angharad spent herself in wailing, and Mrs Morgan tried to steady his thoughts, I could only walk about the hills. I climbed to the tower, but learnt nothing because Morgan or his wife had set fire to it on leaving, and the shell of stones only remained.
On the fourth morning, after a night of storm, all was over. That morning once more I could hear the brook’s murmur which had been obliterated by the storm and by thought. The air was clear and gentle in the coomb behind the farm, and all but still after the night of death and of great wind. High up in the drifting rose of dawn the tall trees were swaying their tips as if stirred by memories of the tempest. They made no sound in the coomb with the trembling of their slender length; some were never to sound again, for they lay motionless and prone in the underwood, or hung slanting among neighbour branches, where they fell in the night—the rabbits could nibble at crests which once wavered about the stars. The path was strewn with broken branches and innumerable twigs.
The silence was so great that I could hear, by enchantment of the ears, the departed storm. Yet the tragic repose was unbroken. One robin singing called up the roars and tumults that had to cease utterly before his voice could gain this power of peculiar sweetness and awe and make itself heard.
The mountains and sky, beautiful as they were, were more beautiful because a cloak of terror had been lifted from them and left them free to the dark and silver, and now rosy, dawn. The masses of the mountains were still heavy and sombre, but their ridges and the protruding tower bit sharply into the sky; the uttermost peaks appeared again, dark with shadows of clouds of a most lustrous whiteness that hung like a white forest, very far off, in the country of the sun. Seen out of the clear gloom of the wood this country was as a place to which a man might wholly and vainly desire to go, knowing that he would be at rest there and there only.
As I listened, walking the ledge between precipice and precipice in the coomb, the silence murmured of the departed tempest like a sea-shell. I could hear the dark hills convulsed with a hollow roaring as of an endless explosion. All night the trees were caught up and shaken in the furious air like grasses; the sounds on earth were mingled with those of the struggle in the high spaces of air. Outside the window branches were brandished wildly, and their anger was the more terrible because the voice of it could not be distinguished amidst the universal voice. The sky itself seemed to aid the roar, as the stars raced over it among floes of white cloud, and dark menacing fragments flitted on messages of darkness across the white. I looked out from the death room, having turned away from the helpless, tranquil bed and the still wife, and saw the hillside trees surging under a wild moon, but they were strange and no longer to be recognised, while the earth was heaving and be-nightmared by the storm. It was the awe of that hour which still hung over the coomb, making its clearness so solemn, its silence so pregnant, its gentleness so sublime. How fresh it was after the sick room, how calm after the vain conflict with death.
The blue smoke rose straight up from the house of death, over there in the white fields, where the wife sat and looked at the dead. Everyone else was talking of the strange life just ended, but the woman who had shared it would tell nothing; she wished only to persuade us that in spite of his extraordinary life he was a good man and very good to her. She had become as silent as Morgan himself, though eleven years before, when she began to live with him on the mountain, she was a happy, gay woman, the best dancer and singer in the village, and had the most lovers. Upon the mountain her wholly black Silurian eyes had turned inwards and taught her lips their mystery and Morgan’s. They buried him, according to his wish, at the foot of the tower. Outraged by this, some of the neighbours removed his body to the churchyard under the cover of night. Others equally enraged at putting such a one in consecrated ground, exhumed him again. But in the end it was in the churchyard that his bones came to rest, with the inscription, chosen by Ann:
“Though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle,
I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.”
Angharad married a pious eccentric much older than herself, and in a year inherited his money. She lives on in one of those gray houses which make Queen Street so stately at Abercorran. She keeps no company but that of the dead. The children call her Angharad of the Folly, or simply Angharad Folly.
“She ought to have gone back to the tower,” said Mr Torrance in some anger.
“She would have done, Mr Torrance,” said Ann, “if she had been a poet; but you would not have done it if you had been through those eleven years and those four nights. No, I really don’t think you would.... I knew a poet who jumped into a girl’s grave, but he was not buried with her. Now you are angry with him, poor fellow, because he did not insist on being buried. Well, but it is lucky he was not, because if he had been we should not have known he was a poet.”
“Well said, Ann,” muttered Aurelius.
“Ann forgets that she was young once,” protested Mr Torrance.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think I do, but I think this, that you forget you will some day be old. Now, as this is Shrove Tuesday and you will be wanting pancakes I must go make them.”
“Good old Ann,” whispered Mr Torrance.
Mr Torrance openly objected to Ann’s epitaph for David Morgan, preferring his own choice of one from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”:
“And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?”
“But” said Mr Morgan, “Shelley was born only a hundred years ago, and died at thirty, I think that in the matter of mountains an older man is better.”
“But, father,” said Roland, “how do you know that Jeremiah was not drowned at thirty with a copy of ‘Ecclesiastes’ clasped to his bosom?”
“You read and see, my son,” answered Mr Morgan. “Shelley could not pass himself off as an old man, though you know he did once claim to be eighty-nine, and Jeremiah would not have pretended to be thirty. That is only my opinion. I prefer the prophet, like Ann.”
Mr Torrance muttered that anyone who preferred Jeremiah to Shelley had no right to an opinion. It was just like Mr Torrance. He was always saying foolish things and fairly often doing them, and yet we felt, and Mr Morgan once declared, that he had in him the imperishable fire of a divine, mysterious wisdom. After walking the full length of the Abbey Road, where he lived, to discover him smiling in his dark study, was sufficient proof that he had a wisdom past understanding.
Abbey Road was over two miles long. At its south end was a double signboard, pointing north “To London,” south “To Forden, Field, and Cowmore”; at its north end it ran into pure London. Every year the horse-chestnut branches had to be shortened in May because their new leaf smothered the signboard. As if anyone who had reached that point could wish to be directed to London! Almost as few could wish to know the way in order to avoid it. But the horse-chestnut had to suffer. It was fortunate in not being cut down altogether and carried away. The cemetery saved it. The acute angle between the Abbey Road and another was filled by a large new cemetery, and the tree was the first of a long line within its railings. Even had the signboard been on the other side of the road it would have been as badly off among the tall thorns and stunted elms of the hedges. Behind this hedge was a waste, wet field, grazed over by a sad horse or two all through the year; for on account partly of the cemetery, partly of the factory which manufactured nobody quite knew what except stench, this field could not be let or sold. Along its far side ran a river which had no sooner begun to rejoice in its freedom to make rush and reed at pleasure on the border of the field than it found itself at the walls of the factory. Northward, past the cemetery and the factory, began the houses of Abbey Road, first a new house, occupied but with a deserted though not wild garden, and next to it a twin house, left empty. Then followed a sluttery of a few pairs or blocks of small houses, also new, on both sides of the road—new and yet old, with the faces of children who are smeared, soiled, and doomed, at two. They bordered on the old inn, “The Woodman’s Arms,” formerly the first house, having a large kitchen garden, and masses of dahlias and sunflowers behind. It lay back a good space from the road, and this space was gravel up to the porch, and in the middle of it stood a stone drinking trough. Often a Gypsy’s cart and a couple of long dogs panting in the sun were to be seen outside, helping the inn to a country look, a little dingy and decidedly private and homely, so that what with the distance between the road and the front door, and the Gypsy’s cart, the passer-by was apt to go on until he came to an ordinary building erected for the sale of beer and spirits, and for nothing else. Such a one lay not much further on, beyond a row of cottages contemporary with “The Woodman’s Arms.” These had long narrow gardens behind wooden posts and rails—gardens where everything tall, old-fashioned, and thick grew at their own sweet will, almost hiding the cottages of wood covered in creeper. You could just see that some were empty, their windows smashed or roughly boarded up, and that others were waiting for some old woman to die before they also had their windows smashed or boarded up. The dahlias, the rose-of-Sharon, the sweet rocket, the snow-on-the-mountains, the nasturtiums, the sunflowers, flourished too thick for weeds to make headway, and so probably with small help from the inhabitants, the gardens earned many a wave of the whip from passing drivers. The row of cottages meant “the first bit of country,” with a sweep at one end, a rat-catcher at the other, announced in modest lettering. Between the last of them and the new public-house a puddled lane ran up along old and thick, but much broken, hedges to the horse-slaughterer’s. “The Victoria Hotel” was built in the Jubilee year of that sovereign, and was a broad-faced edifice of brick with too conspicuous stone work round the windows and doorways and at the corners. The doors were many and mostly of glass. The landlord of “The Victoria” had no time to stand on his doorstep—whichever was his—like the landlord of “The Woodman”; moreover, all his doorsteps were right on the road, and he could have seen only the long row of cottages, by the same builder, which looked as if cut off from a longer, perhaps an endless row, with a pair of shears; while from the old inn could be seen grass sloping to the willows of the river, and a clump of elms hiding the factory chimneys. All the glass and brass of the “Victoria” shone spotless as if each customer out of the regiments in the crowded straight streets gave it a rub on entering and leaving.
Beyond the “Victoria” the road straightened itself after a twist, and was now lined by a hundred houses of one pattern but broken by several branch streets. These were older houses of gray stucco, possessing porches, short flights of steps up to the doors, basements, and the smallest of front gardens packed with neglected laurel, privet, marigold, and chickweed. At the end of the hundred—at No. 367—a man walking “To London” would begin to feel tired, and would turn off the pavement into the road, or else cross to the other side where the scattered new shops and half-built houses had as yet no footway except uneven bare earth. On this side the turnings were full of new houses and pavements, and admitted the eye to views of the welter of slate roofs crowding about the artificial banks of the river which ran as in a pit. Of the branch streets interrupting the stucco hundred, one showed a wide, desolate, untouched field of more and more thistles in the middle, more and more nettles at the edge, and, facing it, a paltry miracle of brand-new villas newly risen out of a similar field; the second was the straight line of a new street, with kerb-stones neat and new, but not a house yet among the nettles; another, an old lane, was still bordered by tender-leafed lime trees, preserved to deck the gardens of houses to come. The lane now and then had a Gypsy’s fire in it for a few hours, and somebody had told the story that Aurelius was born under one of the trees; to which Aurelius answered, “The trees and I were born about the same time, but a hundred miles apart.”
The stucco line gave way to a short row of brick houses, low and as plain as possible, lying well back from the road behind their split-oak fences, thorn hedges, laburnums and other fancy trees. Ivy climbed over all; each was neat and cheerful, but the group had an exclusive expression. Yet they had to look upon half-built shops and houses, varied by a stretch of tarred and barbed fence protecting the playing ground of some football club, whose notice board stood side by side with an advertisement of the land for building on leasehold; over the fence leaned an old cart-horse with his hair between his eyes.
There followed repetitions and variations of these things—inhabited houses, empty houses, houses being erected, fields threatened by houses—and finally a long, gloomy unbroken cliff of stained stucco. The tall houses, each with a basement and a long flight of steps up to a pillared porch, curved away to the number 593, and the celebrated “Horse-shoe Hotel” next door, which looked with dignity and still more ostentation, above its potted bay-trees, on the junction of Abbey Road and two busy thoroughfares. Opposite the tall stucco cliff a continuous but uneven line of newish mean shops of every kind and not more than half the height of the private houses, curved to a public-house as large as the “Horse-shoe” which it faced.
As each rook knows its nest among the scores on the straight uniform beeches, so doubtless each inhabitant could after a time distinguish his own house in this monotonous series, even without looking at the number, provided that there was light and that he was not drunk. Each house had three storeys, the first of them bay-windowed, above the basement. Probably each was divided between two, or, like No. 497, between three, families. Who had the upper storeys I never knew, except that there was an old woman who groaned on the stairs, a crying baby and its mother, and some men. I heard them speak, or cry, or tread the stairs lightly or heavily, but never happened to see any of them, unless that woman was one who was going to enter the gate at the same time as I one evening, but at the sight of me went past with a jug of something half hid under her black jacket. The basement, the floor above, and the garden, were rented to one family, viz., Mr Torrance, his wife and four children.
The garden was a square containing one permanent living thing, and one only, an apple tree which bore large fluted apples of palest yellow on the one bough remaining green among the grey barkless ones. All round the tree the muddy gravel had been trodden, by children playing, so hard that not a weed or blade of grass ever pierced it. Up to it and down to it led two narrow and steep flights of steps, the lower for the children and the mother ascending from the kitchen or living room, the upper for Mr Torrance who used to sit in the back room writing books, except in the mornings when he taught drawing at several schools. He wrote at an aged and time-worn black bureau, from which he could sometimes see the sunlight embracing the apple tree. But into that room the sunlight could not enter without a miracle, or by what so seldom happened as to seem one—the standing open of an opposite window just so that it threw a reflection of the late sun for about three minutes. Even supposing that the sunlight came that way, little could have penetrated that study; for the French windows were ponderously draped by tapestry of dark green with a black pattern, and on one side the bureau, on the other a bookcase, stood partly before the panes. No natural light could reach the ceiling or the corners. Instead of light, books covered the walls, books in a number of black-stained bookcases of various widths, all equal in height with the room, except one that was cut short by a grate in which I never saw a fire. The other few interspaces held small old pictures or prints in dark frames, and a dismal canvas darkened, probably, by some friendly hand. Most of the books were old, many were very old. The huge, blackened slabs of theology and drama emitted nothing but gloom. The red bindings which make some libraries tolerable had been exorcised from his shelves by the spirits of black and of darkest brown.
The sullen host of books left little room for furniture. Nevertheless, there was a massive table of ancient oak, always laden with books, and apparently supported by still other books. Six chairs of similar character had long succeeded in retaining places in front of the books, justifying themselves by bearing each a pile or a chaos of books. Dark as wintry heather were the visible portions of the carpet. The door was hung with the same black and green tapestry as the windows; if opened, it disclosed the mere blackness of a passage crowded with more books and ancestral furniture.
Yet Mr Torrance smiled whenever a visitor, or his wife, or one or all of his children, but, above all, when Aurelius entered the room. No doubt he did not always smile when he was alone writing; for he wrote what he was both reluctant and incompetent to write, at the request of a firm of publishers whose ambition was to have a bad, but nice-looking, book on everything and everybody, written by some young university man with private means, by some vegetarian spinster, or a doomed hack like Mr Torrance. Had he owned copies of all these works they would have made a long row of greens and reds decorated by patterns and lettering in gold. He did not speak of his work, or of himself, but listened, smiled, or—with the children—laughed, and allowed himself at worst the remark that things were not so bad as they seemed. He was full of laughter, but all clever people thought him devoid of humour. In his turn, he admired all clever people, but was uninfluenced by them, except that he read the books which they praised and at once forgot them—he had read Sir Thomas Browne’s “Quincunx,” but could not say what a Quincunx was. Aurelius used to tease him sometimes, I think, in order to prove that the smile was invincible. Mr Torrance was one of the slowest and ungainliest of men, but he was never out of love or even out of patience with Aurelius, the most lightsome of men, or of the superfluous race. He had fine wavy hair like silk fresh from the cocoon, and blue eyes of perfect innocence and fearlessness placed well apart in a square, bony, and big-nosed face that was always colourless. As he wrote, one or all of the children were likely to cry until they were brought into his study, where he had frequently to leave them to avoid being submerged in the chaos set moving by their play. He smiled at it, or if he could not smile, he laughed. If the children were silent for more than a little time he would go out into the passage and call downstairs to make sure that all was well, whereupon at least one must cry, and his wife must shriek to him in that high, sour voice which was always at the edge of tears. Often she came before he called, to stand at his door, talking, complaining, despairing, weeping; and though very sorry, Mr Torrance smiled, and as soon as she had slammed the door he went on with his exquisite small handwriting, or, at most, he went out and counted the apples again. One or more of the children was always ill, nor was any ever well. They were untidy, graceless, and querulous, in looks resembling their mother, whose face seemed to have grown and shaped itself to music—a music that would set the teeth of a corpse on edge. She was never at the end of her work, but often of her strength. She was cruel to all in her impatience, and in her swift, giddy remorse cruel to herself also. She seemed to love and enjoy nothing, yet she would not leave the house on any account, and seldom her work. Whatever she did she could not ruffle her husband or wring from him anything but a smile and a slow, kind sentence. Not that he was content, or dull, or made of lead or wood. He would have liked to dress his wife and children as prettily as they could choose, to ride easily everywhere, anywhere, all over the world if it pleased them, seeing, hearing, tasting nothing but what they thought best on earth. But save in verse he never did so. It was one of his pains that seldom more than once or twice a year came the mood for doing what seemed to him the highest he could, namely, write verses. Also he had bad health; his pipe, of the smallest size, half filled with the most harmless and tasteless tobacco, lay cold on the bureau, just tasted and then allowed to go out. Ale he loved, partly for its own sake, partly to please Aurelius, but it did not love him. It was one of the jokes concerning him, that he could not stand the cold of his morning bath unless he repeated the words,
“Up with me, up with me, into the sky,
For thy song, lark, is strong.”
He said them rapidly, and in an agony of solemnity, as he squeezed the sponge, and though this fact had become very widely known indeed, he did not give up the habit. Had he given up every kind of food condemned by himself or his doctors, he would have lived solely on love in that dark, that cold, that dead room. He was fond of company, but he knew nobody in all those thronged streets, unless it was an old woman or two, and their decrepit, needy husbands. He was a farmer’s son, and knew little more of London than Ann, since he had moved into Abbey Road shortly after his first child was born, and had not been able to extricate himself from the books and furniture.
I see him, as soon as I have sat down by the window, swing round in his chair and look grim as he lights his tobacco with difficulty—then smile and let the smoke pour out of his mouth before beginning to talk, which means that in a few minutes he has laid down the pipe unconsciously, and that it will remain untouched. The children come in; he opens the French windows, and goes down the steps to the apple tree, carrying half the children, followed by the other half. Up he climbs, awkwardly in his black clothes, and getting that grim look under the strain, but smiling at last. He picks all of the seven apples and descends with them. The children are perfectly silent. “This one,” he begins, “is for Annie because she is so small. And this for Jack because he is a good boy. And this for Claude because he is bad and we are all sorry for him. And this for Dorothy because she is so big.” He gives me one, and Dorothy another to take down to her mother, and the last he stows away.
Mr Torrance was often fanciful, and as most people said, affected, in speech. He was full of what appeared to be slight fancies that made others blush uncomfortably. He had rash admirations for more conspicuously fanciful persons, who wore extraordinary clothes or ate or drank in some extraordinary manner. He never said an unkind thing. By what aid, in addition to the various brown breads to which he condemned himself, did he live, and move, and have his being with such gladness?
His books are not the man. They are known only to students at the British Museum who get them out once and no more, for they discover hasty compilations, ill-arranged, inaccurate, and incomplete, and swollen to a ridiculous size for the sake of gain. They contain not one mention of the house under the hill where he was born.
Though he did not write of it, Mr Torrance would gladly talk of the house under the hill where he was born, of the surrounding country and its people. “I can only hope,” he would say, “I can only hope that when I am old, ‘in this our pinching cave,’ I shall remember chiefly the valley of the river Uther where I was born, and the small old house half encircled and half-shadowed by an enormous crescent of beech-covered hills. That is my world in spite of everything. Those fifteen or twenty square miles make the one real thing that I know and cannot forget, in spite of a hundred English scenes wantonly visited and forgotten, in spite of London unforgotten and unintelligible.
“A brook ran out of the hills where they were nearest to us, about half a mile away. Dark trees darkened the two springs of crystal, and the lightest wind made a sad sound in the leaves above them. Before it had travelled a quarter of a mile the brook had gathered about itself a brotherhood of huge trees that always seemed to belong to it, and gave it pomp and mystery together, if the combination is possible. These were sunny trees, a line of towering tall black poplars that led out from the hills to the open agricultural land, a group of the mightiest wych-elms I have ever seen, and one ash-tree standing alone at the water’s edge, the only one of its kind in the neighbourhood. Three miles from its source the brook ran into the main stream of the river Uther, and beyond that I knew nothing except by rumour and guessing. A line drawn between the two ends of the crescent of hills would pass through the junction of brook and river and enclose the country which was mine entirely. The long line of hills far off on the other side of the valley—bare, rounded, and cloud-like hills, whose curving ridges seemed to have growth and change like clouds—was the boundary of the real world, beyond which lay the phantasmal—London, the ocean, China, the Hesperides, Wineland, and all the islands and all the lands that were in books and dreams.
“The farm-houses of my country, and also the manor-house, stood on either side of the brook, low down. There was a mill and a chain of ponds, hardly a mile from the source. Both the ponds and the running water were bordered thickly with sedge, which was the home of birds far more often heard than seen.
“The brook wound among little hills which were also intersected by rough roads, green lanes, footpaths, and deserted trackways, watery, and hollow and dark. As the roads never went on level ground all were more or less deeply worn, and the overhanging beeches above and the descending naked roots made them like groves in a forest. When a road ran into another or crossed it there was a farm. The house itself was of grey-white stone, roofed with tiles; the barn and sheds, apparently tumbling but never tumbledown, were of dark boards and thatch, and surrounded by a disorderly region of nettles, remains of old buildings and walls, small ponds either black in the shadow of quince bushes, or emerald with duck-weed, and a few big oaks or walnuts where the cart-horses and their foals and a young bull or two used to stand. A moorhen was sure to be swimming across the dark pond with a track of ripples like a peacock’s tail shining behind it. Fowls scuttered about or lay dusting themselves in the middle of the road, while a big black-tailed cock perched crowing on a plough handle or a ruined shed. A cock without a head or a running fox stood up or drooped on the roof for a weather-vane, but recorded only the wind of some long past year which had finally disabled it. The walls of outhouses facing the road were garrulous with notices of sales and fairs to be held shortly or held years ago.
“At a point where one lane ran into another, as it were on an island, the inn with red blinds on its four windows looked down the road. The inn-keeper was a farmer by profession, but every day drank as much as he sold, except on a market or fair day. On an ordinary day I think he was always either looking down the road for someone to come and drink with him, or else consoling himself inside for lack of company. He seemed to me a nice man, but enormous; I always wondered how his clothes contained him; yet he could sit on the mower or tosser all day long in the June sun when he felt inclined. On a market or fair day there would be a flock of sheep or a lot of bullocks waiting outside while the drover smoked half a pipe and drank by the open door. And then the landlord was nowhere to be seen: I suppose he was at the market or up in the orchard. For it was the duty of his wife, a little mousy woman with mousy eyes, to draw the beer when a customer came to sit or stand among the empty barrels that filled the place. It was Called ‘The Crown.’ They said it had once been ‘The Crown and Cushion,’ but the cushion was so hard to paint, and no one knew why a crown should be cushioned or a cushion crowned, and it was such a big name for the shanty, that it was diminished to ‘The Crown.’ But it had those four windows with crimson blinds, and the landlady was said to be a Gypsy and was followed wherever she went by a white-footed black cat that looked as if it was really a lady from a far country enchanted into a cat. The Gypsy was a most Christian body. She used to treat with unmistakeable kindness, whenever he called at the inn, a gentleman who was notoriously an atheist and teetotaler. When asked upbraidingly why, she said: ‘He seems a nice gentleman, and as he is going to a place where there won’t be many comforts, I think we ought to do our best to make this world as happy as possible for him.’
“Opposite to the inn was a carpenter’s shop, full of windows, and I remember seeing the carpenter once at midnight there, working at a coffin all alone in the glare in the middle of the blackness. He was a mysterious man. He never touched ale. He had a soft face with silky grizzled hair and beard, large eyes, kind and yet unfriendly, and strange gentle lips as rosy as a pretty girl’s. I had an extraordinary reverence for him due to his likeness to a picture at home of the greatest of the sons of carpenters. He was tall and thin, and walked like an over-grown boy. Words were rare with him. I do not think he ever spoke to me, and this silence and his ceaseless work—and especially that one midnight task—fascinated me. So I would stare for an hour at a time at him and his work, my face against the window, without his ever seeming to notice me at all. He had two dogs, a majestic retriever named Ruskin who was eighteen years old, and a little black and white mongrel named Jimmy; and the two accompanied him and ignored one another. One day as I was idling along towards the shop, smelling one of those clusters of wild carrot seeds, like tiny birds’ nests, which are scented like a ripe pear sweeter and juicier than ever grew on pear-tree, the carpenter came out with a gun under one arm and a spade under the other and went a short distance down the road and then into a field which belonged to him. I followed. No sooner had I begun to look over the gate than the carpenter lifted his gun and pointed it at the retriever who had his back turned and was burying a bone in a corner of the field. The carpenter fired, the old dog fell in a heap with blood running out of his mouth, and Jimmy burst out of the hedge, snatched the bone, and disappeared. If it had been anyone but the carpenter I should have thought this murder a presumptuous and cruel act; his face and its likeness taught me that it was a just act; and that, more than anything else, made justice inseparable in my mind from pain and intolerable mystery. I was overawed, and watched him from the moment when he began to dig until all that was mortal of the old dog was covered up. It seems he had been ill and a burden to himself for a long time. I thought it unjust that he should have been shot when his back was turned, and this question even drowned my indignation at the mongrel’s insolence.
“I knew most of the farmers and labourers, and they were and are as distinct in my mind as the kings of England. They were local men with names so common in the churchyard that for some time I supposed it was a storehouse, rather than a resting-place, of farmers and labourers. They took small notice of me, and I was never tired of following them about the fields, ploughing, mowing, reaping, and in the milking sheds, in the orchards and the copses. Nothing is more attractive to children than a man going about his work with a kindly but complete indifference to themselves. It is a mistake to be always troubling to show interest in them, whether you feel it or not. I remember best a short, thick, dark man, with a face like a bulldog’s, broader than it was long, the under-lip sticking out and up and suggesting great power and fortitude. Yet it was also a kind face, and when he was talking I could not take my eyes off it, smiling as it was kneaded up into an enormous smile, and watching the stages of the process by which it was smoothed again. When he was on his deathbed his son, who was a tailor, used to walk over every evening from the town for a gossip. The son had a wonderful skill in mimicry, and a store of tales to employ it, but at last the old man, shedding tears of laughter, had to beg him not to tell his best stories because laughing hurt so much. He died of cancer. No man could leave that neighbourhood and not be missed in a hundred ways; I missed chiefly this man’s smile, which I could not help trying to reproduce on my own face long afterwards. But nobody could forget him, even had there been no better reasons, because after he died his house was never again occupied. A labourer cultivated the garden, but the house was left, and the vine leaves crawled in at the broken windows and spread wanly into the dark rooms. A storm tumbled the chimney through the roof. No ghost was talked of. The house was part of his mortal remains decaying more slowly than the rest. The labourer in the garden never pruned the vine or the apple-trees, or touched the flower borders. He was a wandering, three-quarter-witted fellow who came from nowhere and had no name but Tom. His devotion to the old man had been like a dog’s. Friends or relatives or home of his own he had none, or could remember none. In fact, he had scarce any memory; when anything out of his past life came by chance into his head, he rushed to tell his master and would repeat it for days with pride and for fear of losing it, as he invariably did. One of these memories was a nonsensical rigmarole of a song which he tried to sing, but it was no more singing than talking, and resembled rather the whimper of a dog in its sleep; it had to do with a squire and a Welshman, whose accent and mistaken English might alone have made the performance black mystery. They tried to get his ‘real’ name out of him, but he knew only Tom. Asked who gave it to him, he said it was Mr Road, a former employer, a very cruel man whom he did not like telling about. They asked him if he was ever confirmed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they tried, but I could not confirm.’ He would do anything for his master, rise at any hour of the night though he loved his bed, and go anywhere. Summer or Winter, he would not sleep in a house, but in a barn. Except his master’s in the last illness, he would not enter any house. He was fond of beer in large quantities, but if he got drunk with it he was ashamed of himself, and might go off and not return for months: then one day he would emerge from the barn, shaking himself and smiling an awkward twisted smile and as bashful as a baby. What a place this modern world is for a man like that, now. I do not like to think he is still alive in it. All the people who could understand him are in the workhouse or the churchyard. The churchyard is the only place where he would be likely to stay long. No prison, asylum, or workhouse, could have kept him alive for many days.
“The church was like a barn except that it was nearly always empty, and only mice ever played in it. Though I went to it every Sunday I never really got over my dislike of the parson, which began in terror. He was the only man in the country who invariably wore black from top to toe. One hot, shining day I was playing in a barn, and the doors were open, so that I saw a field of poppies making the earth look as if it had caught fire in the sun; the swallows were coming in and out, and I was alone, when suddenly a black man stood in the sunny doorway. The swallows dashed and screamed at him angrily, and I thought that they would destroy themselves, for they returned again and again to within an inch of him. I could not move. He stood still, then with a smile and a cough he went away without having said a word. The next time I saw him was in the churchyard, when I was about five, and had not yet begun to attend the Church; in fact I had never entered it to my knowledge. The nurse-girl wheeled me up to the churchyard wall and stopped at the moment when the black man appeared out of the church. Behind him several men were carrying a long box between them on their shoulders, and they also were in complete black, and after them walked men, women, and children, in black; one of the older women was clinging convulsively to a stiff young man. When they had all stopped, the parson coughed and muttered something, which was followed by a rustling and a silence; the woman clinging to the young man sobbed aloud, and her hair fell all over her cheeks like rain. The nurse-girl had been chatting with a few passers-by who were watching outside the wall, but as I saw the woman’s hair fall I began to cry and I was hurried away. Through the lych-gate I saw a hole in the ground and everyone looking down into it as if they had lost something. At this I stopped crying and asked the girl what they were looking for; but she only boxed my ears and I cried again. When at last she told me that there was a man ‘dead’ in the box, and that they had put him into the ground, I felt sure that the black man was in some way the cause of the trouble. I remembered the look he had given me at the barn door, and the cough. I was filled with wonder that no one had attempted to rescue the ‘dead,’ and then with fear and awe at the power of the black man. Whenever I saw him in the lane I ran away, he was so very black. Nor was the white surplice ever more than a subterfuge to make him like the boys in the choir, while his unnatural voice, praying or preaching, sounded as if it came up out of the hole in the ground where the ‘dead’ had been put away.
“How glad I was always, to be back home from the church; though dinner was ready I walked round the garden, touching the fruit-trees one by one, stopping a minute in a corner where I could be unseen and yet look at the house and the thick smoke pouring out of the kitchen chimney. Then I rushed in and kissed my mother. The rest of the day was very still, no horses or carts going by, no sound of hoes, only the cows passing to the milkers. My father and my mother were both very silent on that day, and I felt alone and never wanted to stray far; if it was fine I kept to the garden and orchard; if wet, to the barn. The day seems in my memory to have always been either sunny or else raining with roars of wind in the woods on the hills; and I can hear the sound, as if it had been inaudible on other days, of wind and rain in the garden trees. If I climbed up into the old cherry-tree that forked close to the ground I could be entirely hidden, and I used to fancy myself alone in the world, and kept very still and silent lest I should be found out. But I gave up climbing the tree after the day when I found Mrs Partridge there before me. I never made out why she was up there, so quiet.
“Mrs Partridge was a labourer’s wife who came in two or three days a week to do the rough work. I did not like her because she was always bustling about with a great noise and stir, and she did not like me because I was a spoilt, quiet child. She was deferential to all of us, and called me ‘Sir’; but if I dared to touch the peel when she was baking, or the bees-wax that she rubbed her irons on when she was ironing, she talked as if she were queen or I were naught. While she worked she sang in a coarse, high-pitched voice or tried to carry on a conversation with my mother, though she might be up in the orchard. She was a little woman with a brown face and alarming glittering eyes. She was thickly covered with clothes, and when her skirts were hoisted up to her knees, as they usually were, she resembled a partridge. She was as quick and plump as a partridge. She ran instead of walking, her head forward, her hands full of clothes and clothes-pegs, and her voice resounding. No boy scrambled over gates or fences more nimbly. She feared nothing and nobody. She was harsh to her children, but when her one-eyed cat ate the Sunday dinner she could not bear to strike it, telling my mother, ‘I’ve had the poor creature more than seven years.’ She was full of idioms and proverbs, and talked better than any man has written since Cobbett. One of her proverbs has stayed fantastically in my mind, though I have forgotten the connection—‘As one door shuts another opens.’ It impressed me with great mystery, and as she said it the house seemed very dark, and, though it was broad daylight and summer, I heard the wind howling in the roof just as it often did at night and on winter afternoons.
“Mrs Partridge had a husband of her own size, but with hollowed cheeks the colour of leather. Though a slight man he had broad shoulders and arms that hung down well away from his body, and this, with his bowed stiff legs, gave him a look of immense strength and stability: to this day it is hard to imagine that such a man could die. When I heard his horses going by on a summer morning I knew that it was six o’clock; when I saw them returning I knew that it was four. He was the carter, and he did nothing but work, except that once a week he went into the town with his wife, drank a pint of ale with her, and helped her to carry back the week’s provisions. He needed nothing but work, out of doors, and in the stables, and physical rest indoors; and he was equally happy in both. He never said anything to disturb his clay pipe, though that was usually out. What he thought about I do not know, and I doubt if he did; but he could always break off to address his horses by name, every minute or two, in mild rebuke or cheerful congratulation, as much for his own benefit as for theirs, to remind himself that he had their company. He had full responsibility for four cart-horses, a plough, a waggon, and a dung-cart. He cared for the animals as if they had been his own: if they were restless at night he also lost his sleep. Although so busy he was never in haste, and he had time for everything save discontent. His wife did all the talking, and he had his way without taking the pipe out of his mouth. She also had her own way, in all matters but one. She was fond of dancing; he was not, and did not like to see her dance. When she did so on one tempting occasion, and confessed it, he slept the night in the barn and she did not dance again. There was a wonderful sympathy between them, and I remember hearing that when she knew that she was going to have a baby, it was he and not she that was indisposed.
“Our house was a square one of stone and tiles, having a porch and a room over it, and all covered up in ivy, convolvulus, honeysuckle, and roses, that mounted in a cloud far over the roof and projected in masses, threatening some day to pull down all with their weight, but never trimmed. The cherry-tree stretched out a long horizontal branch to the eaves at one side. In front stood two pear-trees, on a piece of lawn which was as neat as the porch was wild, and around their roots clustered a thicket of lilac and syringa, hiding the vegetable-garden beyond. These trees darkened and cooled the house, but that did not matter. In no other house did winter fires ever burn so brightly or voices sound so sweet; and outside, the sun was more brilliant than anywhere else, and the vegetable-garden was always bordered by crimson or yellow flowers. The road went close by, but it was a hollow lane, and the heads of the passers-by did not reach up to the bottom of our hedge, whose roots hung down before caves that were continually being deepened by frost. This hedge, thickened by traveller’s joy, bramble, and ivy, entirely surrounded us; and as it was high as well as thick you could not look out of it except at the sky and the hills—the road, the neighbouring fields, and all houses being invisible. The gate, which was reached by a flight of steps up from the road, was half-barricaded and all but hidden by brambles and traveller’s joy, and the unkempt yew-tree saluted and drenched the stranger—in one branch a golden-crested wren had a nest year after year.
“Two trees reigned at the bottom of the garden—at one side an apple; at the other, just above the road, a cypress twice as high as the house, ending in a loose plume like a black cock’s tail. The apple-tree was old, and wore as much green in winter as in summer, because it was wrapped in ivy, every branch was furry with lichen and moss, and the main boughs bushy with mistletoe. Each autumn a dozen little red apples hung on one of its branches like a line of poetry in a foreign language, quoted in a book. The thrush used to sing there first in winter, and usually sang his last evening song there, if it was a fine evening. Yet the cypress was my favourite. I thought there was something about it sinister to all but myself. I liked the smell of it, and when at last I went to the sea its bitterness reminded me of the cypress. Birds were continually going in and out of it, but never built in it. Only one bird sang in it, and that was a small, sad bird which I do not know the name of. It sang there every month of the year, it might be early or it might be late, on the topmost point of the plume. It never sang for long, but frequently, and always suddenly. It was black against the sky, and I saw it nowhere else. The song was monotonous and dispirited, so that I fancied it wanted us to go, because it did not like the cheerful garden, and my father’s loud laugh, and my mother’s tripping step: I fancied it was up there watching the clouds and very distant things in hope of a change; but nothing came, and it sang again, and waited, ever in vain. I laughed at it, and was not at all sorry to see it there, for it had stood on that perch in all the happy days before, and so long as it remained the days would be happy. My father did not like the bird, but he was often looking at it, and noted its absence as I did. The day after my sister died he threw a stone at it—the one time I saw him angry—and killed it. But a week later came another, and when he heard it he burst into tears, and after that he never spoke of it but just looked up to see if it was there when he went in or out of the porch. We had taller trees in the neighbourhood, such as the wych-elms and the poplars by the brook, but this was a solitary stranger and could be seen several miles away like a black pillar, as the old cherry could in blossom-time, like a white dome. You were seldom out of sight of it. It was a station for any bird flying to or from the hills. A starling stopped a minute, piped and flew off. The kestrel was not afraid to alight and look around. The nightjar used it. At twilight it was encircled by midges, and the bats attended them for half an hour. Even by day it had the sinister look which was not sinister to me: some of the night played truant and hid in it throughout the sunshine. Often I could see nothing, when I looked out of my window, but the tree and the stars that set round it, or the mist from the hills. What with this tree, and the fruit-trees, and the maples in the hedge, and the embowering of the house, I think the birds sometimes forgot the house. In the mornings, in bed, I saw every colour on the woodpigeon, and the ring on his neck, as he flew close by without swerving. At breakfast my father would say, ‘There’s a kestrel.’ We looked up and saw nothing, but on going to the window, there was the bird hovering almost above us. I suppose its shadow or its blackening of the sky made him aware of it before he actually saw it.
“Next to us—on still days we heard the soft bell rung in the yard there at noon—was the manor-house, large, but unnoticeable among its trees. I knew nothing about the inside of it, but I went all over the grounds, filled my pockets with chestnuts, got a peach now and then from the gardener, picked up a peacock’s feather. Wonderfully beautiful ladies went in and out of that old house with the squire. A century back he would have been a pillar of the commonwealth: he was pure rustic English, and his white hair and beard had an honourable look as if it had been granted to him for some rare service; no such beards are to be found now in country-houses. I do not know what he did: I doubt if there is anything for such a man to do to-day except sit for his portrait to an astonished modern painter. I think he knew men as well as horses; at least he knew everyone in that country, had known them all when he and they were boys. He was a man as English, as true to the soil, as a Ribston pippin.
“The woods on the hills were his, or at least such rights as anybody had in them were his. As for me, I got on very well in them with no right at all. Now, home and the garden were so well known, so safe, and so filled with us, that they seemed parts of us, and I only crept a little deeper into the core when I went to bed at night, like a worm in a big sweet apple. But the woods on the hills were utterly different, and within them you could forget that there was anything in the world but trees and yourself, an insignificant self, so wide and solitary were they. The trees were mostly beeches and yews, massed closely together. Nothing could grow under them. Except for certain natural sunny terraces not easily found, they covered the whole hills from top to bottom, even in the steepest parts where you could slide, run, and jump the whole distance down—about half a mile—in two minutes. The soil was dead branches and dead leaves of beech and yew. Many of the trees were dead: the stumps stood upright until they were so rotten that I could overturn them with a touch. Others hung slanting among the boughs of their companions, or were upheld by huge cables of honeysuckle or traveller’s joy which had once climbed up them and flowered over their crests. Many had mysterious caverns at their roots, and as it were attic windows high up where the owls nested. The earth was a honeycomb of rabbits’ burrows and foxes’ earths among the bony roots of the trees, some of them stuffed with a century of dead leaves.
“Where the slope was least precipitous or had a natural ledge, two or three tracks for timber-carriages had once been made. But these had not been kept up, and were not infallible even as footpaths. They were, however, most useful guides to the terraces, where the sun shone and I could see the cypress and my mother among the sunflowers, and the far-away hills.
“On my ninth birthday they gave me an old horn that had been a huntsman’s, and when I was bold and the sun was bright, I sometimes blew it in the woods, trembling while the echoes roamed among the gulfs which were hollowed in the hillsides, and my mother came out into the little garden far off. During the autumn and winter the huntsman blew his horn in the woods often for a whole day together. The root caves and old earths gave the fox more than a chance. The horses were useless. The hounds had to swim rather than run in perpetual dead leaves. If I saw the fox I tried hard not to shout and betray him, but the temptation was very strong to make the echo, for I was proud of my halloo, and I liked to see the scarlet coats, the lordly riders and the pretty ladies, and to hear the questing hound and horn, and the whips calling Ajax, Bravery, Bannister, Fury Nell, and the rest. Then at last I was glad to see the pack go by at the day’s end, with sleepy heads, taking no notice of me and waving tails that looked clever as if they had eyes and ears in them, and to hear the clatter of horses dying round the end of the crescent into the outer world.
“Nobody took heed of the woods except the hunters. The timber was felled if at all by the west wind. The last keeper had long ago left his thatched cottage under the hill, where the sun shone so hot at midday on the reed-thatched shed and the green mummy of a stoat hanging on the wall. So I met nobody in the woods. I took an axe there day after day for a week and chopped a tree half through, unmolested except by the silence, which, however, wore me out with its protest.
“The woods ended at the top in a tangle of thorns, and it was there I saw my first fox. I was crawling among some brambles, amusing myself with biting off the blackberries, when a fox jumped up out of a tuft and faced me, his eyes on the level with mine. I was pleased as well as startled, never took my eyes off him, and presently began to crawl forward again. But at this the fox flashed his teeth at me with a snap, and was off before I could think of anything to say. High above these thorns stood four Scotch firs, forming a sort of gateway by which I usually re-entered the woods. Gazing up their tall stems that moved slowly and softly like a grasshopper’s horns, as if they were breathing, I took my last look at the sky before plunging under beech and yew. There were always squirrels in one of them, chasing one another clattering up and down the bark, or chattering at me, close at hand, as if their nerves were shattered with surprise and indignation. When they had gone out of sight I began to run—faster and faster, running and sliding down with a force that carried me over the meadow at the foot, and across the road to the steps and home. I had ten years in that home and in those woods. Then my father died; I went to school; I entered an office. Those ten years were reality. Everything since has been scarcely more real than the world was when it was still cut off by the hills across the valley, and I looked lazily towards it from under the cypress where the little bird sang. There is nothing to rest on, nothing to make a man last like the old men I used to see in cottage gardens or at gateways in the valley of the Uther.”
“Well,” said Mr Morgan once, “I don’t often agree with Mr Torrance, but I am very glad he exists.”